Let's go to Hawaii

A long story about my brother and me

HOW THE BIG ISLAND OF HAWAI'I INTRODUCED ME TO MY BROTHER

This is a story about black sand beaches and java rice sparrows and the friendly wild horses who live amid the strange splendors of the Waipi’o Valley. It’s about parrot beak heliconia blossoms and wiliwili trees and legends concerning the fire goddess, Pele. It’s about poi ball dancing in a natural amphitheater created by the roots of banyan trees, and literal river roads, the only way to a treehouse-for-rent perched in a monkey pod tree. It’s about eating breakfasts picked from a backyard rainforest and drinking Kai vodka and Kona coffee. It’s about vertiginous 2,000 foot lava rock walls and 1,200 foot waterfalls and the true meaning of hula. It’s about how when you let go of an agenda and follow your nose, a certain kind of serendipity happens. And it’s about the brother who’s been in my life since I was five years old, whom I tortured and maligned and ignore, but never got to know, until  now.

*

Normally, I believe that the best way to travel is to experience a place through the people who live there. This time, I’ll be doing the opposite, because I have a feeling that the way for me to get to know the person I have come to see is through the lens of the simultaneously laid back and exotic place he so definitively chose to call home.

My brother, Jeffery, and I grew up in a way that did not foster closeness, and when we left home, we did not call, we did not write. In the thirty-plus years since he moved to Hawai’i, I visited him only once, fifteen years ago, and at that time I stayed in an ultra-luxurious home on the opposite side of the island from where he lives, over an hour’s drive away. I saw him, but I didn’t really see him--or Hawai’i. I was a different person then. The person I am now wants to right some wrongs.

*

            At eight o’clock on Sunday night, my plane touches down at the Kona airport. I look out my window at the twinkling lights on the distant hills and think, Huh. This looks like Sausalito. That is the first and last time I will compare this island with any place I’ve ever seen before.

Jeff’s wife, Tobi, a great looking woman who hails from Georgia and has the accent to prove it, will be picking me up at the airport because  Jeff is working at the Hilton Waikoloa Village, a luxury resort hotel on the western Kilua-Kona side of the island. His other job, as noted on his truck and on his card, is “Advanced Recreation.”   He takes people flying up to twelve thousand feet in a motorized hang glider called a “trike” or “ultralight,” with nothing at all between them and the open air, and also teaches same.

 Although Jeff works on the dry volcanic side of the island, he lives on the tropical, northeastern side, in Kukuihaele, a town so small it has to share the zip code of Honoka’a, the next town over. His house is on the Hamakua (“Many Waterfalls) Coast, a forty mile stretch running between Waipi’o Valley and Hilo.

When I come out to the curb to meet Tobi, she puts a lei around my neck. “Welcome to Hawai’i,” she says. I touch the soft plumeria blossoms, thank her, and climb into the car the hour-long ride to their house. It’s so dark! There’s almost no other traffic, and I remark on the absence of lights and stop signs. “Oh, there’s a stop sign in this one town we’ll go by,” Tobi said. “And they have a stop light, too.” Already, I like it here.

Not far from the house, Tobi suddenly puts on the brakes, rolls down the window, and yells,” Elvis! Get out of the road!”  What appears to be a German shepherd mixed- breed blinks languidly in the headlights, and finally ambles out of the way. “He’s always doing this,” Tobi tells me. “When my mother was here to visit, we came upon him lying on his back with his legs sticking straight up, right in the middle of the road. My mother screamed: she thought he was dead.”  Luckily, most people know about Elvis, and they slow down when they get to the area he hangs out in, so he stays resolutely alive.

            When we reach the pole house that Jeff helped design and build, we pull up a steep driveway and step out of the car. I look up and am rendered dumbstruck. I cannot see the stars for the stars. I have never seen a night sky so crowded with constellations, or with the filmy sweep of the Milky Way so breathtakingly evident. When I can finally speak, I say, “Look at the stars.” Tobi says, “Uh huh, you’ll probably see some shooting stars, too.”  

“And listen to the birds!” I say, and Tobi says, “Those aren’t birds. Those are singing tree frogs called coqui. They are native to Puerto Rico and have no natural predators here; so they just breed and breed and breed.”  I listen again, and this is what I hear: Couqui! Couqui! Coqui!  Talk about your onomatopoeia.

            Tobi leads me through the garage and up some concrete steps imprinted with taro and breadfruit leaves from the Waipi’o Valley, and various philodendron and ferns from their yard (Tobi’s idea; Jeff’s implementation). The guest quarters are a little apartment located beneath the house. I have a spacious bedroom with a futon and a recliner, and a bathroom with a tub-for-two and a bouquet of yellow pincushion proteas next to the sink—they grow in profusion in the front yard. There’s a kitchenette with a coffeemaker and a little fridge. Abutting the steep drop into the rainforest that is the back yard is my own private lanai, featuring  two chairs, a table, and an outdoor shower.  There’s also a hammock chair hung at the very edge of an unguarded side of the lanai, so if you have the courage to hop into it, you can enjoy an unobstructed view. I take one look at the drop and decide I’ll keep to the chairs behind the single ohi’a wooden rail. 

*

I awaken early to the sounds of wind chimes and rushing water. I remember that my brother has a waterfall in his back yard: it makes for yet another outdoor shower and a swimming hole and a stream that runs through the property.  The sun hasn’t come up yet, and I make a cup of Kona coffee and go to sit on the lanai to wait for dawn. I’m wrapped in a blanket for the bit of chill in the air, and soon Uli, Jeff’s cat, appears and leaps into my lap. She kneads my leg through the blanket and together we look out through the thick green foliage and watch the sky lighten to sherbet yellow, then white, then blue. I hear the sound of my brother’s five cockatiels, the staccato bleating of his two goats, the honking of his goose, and I see his two ducks waddling around by the stream.  From across the street comes the crow of a rooster.  Wild birds sweep through the open areas between the trees too fast for me to really see them.

            After a while, I head upstairs to the main level of Jeff’s house. I stand on the lanai for a moment, looking out at a picture postcard view of the ocean, then slide open the glass door and come inside. There is a living room, a kitchen, an office, a large bathroom, and a loft bedroom, and all of the walls are glass. There are many lanais, one called “the dog’s lanai”—my brother also has two dogs. Penny is mostly Beagle with a little Jack Russell thrown in. Rio, who had her doggie DNA tested, is: Chihuahua, Dalmatian, Parson Russell Terrier, Poodle, Border Collie, and Yorkshire Terrier.  Suffice it to say this explains everything about her. Jeff used to have a potbelly pig, too, but he had to give it away because it kept tearing up the neighbor’s garden.

I find Tobi in the kitchen, and then I hear my brother’s voice; and there he is. We greet each other a little shyly: we might be co-workers starting a new job on the same day. He tells me he has to work today, but then he’s arranged to have three days off: lots of time for him to show me the island, and he’d like to get me up in the trike, too. “Oh, uh huh,” I say, but I’m thinking, The hell you say. Jeff  says he has time for a little hike before he has to leave. First, though, comes the morning ritual, something that, along with sitting out on my lanai and watching the sun come up, I will thoroughly enjoy every day of my stay.

            We take zigzag paths down the steep hill, past the handmade lava rock support walls Jeff built, and down to the floor of the property. Then we cross a bridge he built over the stream in order to get to the goat pen. I’m thinking, How did he learn to build all this stuff? I don’t remember him with so much as a Tinker Toy!

First, we feed the ducks, Quackers and Duckless, and Goldie, the goose. Rio and Quackers play together until Quackers lies down and holds still, which is her signal for Rio to lay off.

Next, we feed the goats, Daisy and Lehua. There’s a wooden swing hanging from a tree in the goat pen, and when I get on it, Lehua rises to her hind legs and hops beside me as I move back and forth thorough the air. It’s as though she wants to swing with me, and this is the best she can do.  She also tries to eat my blouse. Rio plays with Daisy until the goat starts head-butting.

Next, Rio and Penny do their tricks: Jeff sends each of them to their respective rocks. Rio gets a treat for doing the following: jumping over a stick, winding in figure 8’s through Jeff’s legs as he’s standing still, then as he’s walking, and for giving a high five. Penny, not quite as gifted as Rio in the trick department, gets a treat for …well, for being Penny.    

After the dogs and the cat and the cockatiels are also fed, Tobi packs a cooler and the three of us head off for the nearby Waipi'o Valley, also called the Valley of the Kings, because it used to be the heart of Hawaiian politics and religion. Thousands used to live here, raising taro and lotus and hunting for fish; now, because of tsunamis and the seductive pull to live a Westernized life, only a few dozen do. The narrow road down is alarmingly steep—it drops 1,000 feet in one mile-- and full of hairpin curves: Jeff drops his truck in to low range, low gear and proceeds carefully forward. Tobi and I are riding in lawn chairs in the open back of the truck. May I repeat that? Tobi and I are riding in lawn chairs in the open back of the truck. When I see how close we are to the edge of the road, I feel as though my stomach has moved up into my throat. I mention something about the lack of seatbelts, and Tobi says, “Oh, you don’t wear a seatbelt on this road. If anything happens, you’ll need to be able to get out of the truck.” If anything happens refers, I know, to the truck tumbling down, down, down. I stare straight ahead and try to take in the magnificent sight of the ocean rather than envisioning myself lying smashed on the ground with Xs for eyes.  I pray we won’t encounter another vehicle, which would mean we’d have to back up a long ways: those coming up the hill have the right of way.

When we reach the bottom, we park near the black sand beach. We cross a shallow path of water with a pull of surf impressive enough that I’m grateful for Tobi taking my arm. “Just look up,” she tells me. “If you watch the water, it can be disorienting. And be aware of each step.”  She tells me about Uncle Earl, an elderly Japanese man who drank warm beer from the bottle with a straw, and was the first to instruct Tobi and Jeff on how to walk across a river with a strong current. He told them,  “Only one life lesson you have to learn: Pay attention.”

We settle ourselves down for a picnic of sushi, Japanese peanut crackers, artichoke dip, oranges and Hawaiian beer, and I take in the sight of the moss-green gorge that leads to the back wall of the valley. The valley is only one mile wide, but it goes back some six miles. Tobi and Jeff tell me we will drive deep into it on another day; there’s someone who lives there whom they want me to meet.

There are surfers down here, and a little girl playing contentedly by herself at water’s edge. There are cattle egret, white birds that sit on the back of cows and horses to pick off the bugs. Tobi says she sees them flying off to work every morning when she goes to work, then sees them coming home when she does. She rides a free bus that goes around the island, filled mostly with Filipino staff who work at the hotels, and she loves it both for the company and for the gas money it saves her.

 After we eat, we take a little hike, and I am introduced to Indian mulberry and tropical almond and beach naupaka, also called half-flower bushes, which have beguiling little blossoms that are just that. Tobi tells me a legend behind them: Pele, the fire goddess, had a lover who spurned her for the affections of her sister. Infuriated by their betrayal, Pele turned each of them into half flowers, but as one variety lives on the beach and one in the mountains, they are forever separated. Another legend I like hearing about Pele is that she appears before a volcanic eruption: sometimes as an old hag, sometimes as a beautiful woman, and on lazy days, she sends her white dog as a warning.

After Jeff goes to work, I sit out on my lanai and Toby soon joins me. “What all do you have growing back here?” I ask, gesturing to the sea of greenery before me. Tobi points to something right in front of me.  “That tree came after one day when we were eating a mango, and we tossed the seed over the balcony.” She takes in a deep breath. “And….We have night-blooming jasmine and wild coffee and Tahitian limes and Kaffir limes. Avocado and mango and papaya and money trees and banana leaf trees. Lots of varieties of ferns. Over there’s the ti plant, which has huge leaves we use to wrap food in and cook it, and it’s also used for skirts and for blessing a new home. We have kukui trees and coconut trees.  And orchid plants and heliconia and white- and yellow- and awapuhi- ginger, called ‘shampoo ginger,’ which is what Paul Mitchell uses in his stuff. We have wild impatiens and sleeping hibiscus and Norfolk pines. Oh, and there’s lillipop plants, and Malibar chestnut trees and white and red poinsettias. At this time of the year we have tree daisies, too, which I love so much.”

            “And birds?” I ask.

            “Well, there’s the melodious laughing-thrushes, yellow beaked cardinals, Japanese white eyes. The red-billed leiothrix live in the banyan trees. Java rice sparrows come like crazy to the birdfeeders—you’ll see them every day. Myna birds come too, but we don’t like them because they eat the cat’s food, so we shoo them away. On the beach, we see nutmeg mannikins and night-crowned black herons.”

            I sit back in my chair and sigh. I feel like I’ve just been handed a two-ton package to fit in a two-ounce space. I literally cannot conceive of the breadth of such offerings.

            That evening Tobi and I have a dinner of salad and some of her homemade French bread.  “Bread’s so expensive around here,” she says. “It can be six dollars a loaf. So I took a class and learned how to make it.” I ask about her charming oil paintings—almost all are outdoor scenes from or around her house, and many feature the animals she and Jeff have or are visited by. “I didn’t know you were a painter,” I tell Tobi.

 “Well, I took a class from a woman in my church,” Tobi says. “I was telling this woman one day about how I wanted to take a painting class and this other woman, Ann, overheard me and said, ‘I teach painting. What do you want to learn?’ I told her, Oil painting. She said, ‘That’s what I teach! I’ll go home and pray on it and see if I should teach you.’ Next day she calls and says she will.”

            Jeff and Tobi have no children, and at one point, I ask her, Did you ever want to have kids?”

“No,” she says. “I wanted a monkey. I wanted to have a monkey and live high up in the Alps with him. I used to make little drawings of the house I wanted to build for my monkey and me. There was a downstairs and an upstairs, and I ran the heating vent from the living room up to the bedroom so that we would keep warm.”

I think about this, and then I tell her, “Well, here you are living at a kind of high altitude in a house with a loft, and you live with a fun-loving and mischievous mate. I’d say you came close.” 

*

Early the next morning, I set out alone to meander up Jeff’s road, and the things I see on this short walk alone are worth the price of admission: Christmas berries and Angel’s trumpet. Miles of blue ocean and the verdant undulations of the imposing cliff faces. Two little dogs roughhousing next to a flock of seemingly disapproving chickens. A single black horse in a green grass pasture, early morning mist swirling around him.  When I get back to the house, I sit on one of the lanais with Tobi and my brother have a breakfast of papaya and banana and homemade English muffins. In the background are the sounds of the cockatiels: one is imitating the sound of a ringing phone. “He does the microwave beep, too,” Jeff tells me. “And he can do a few bars of the theme from The Andy Griffith show.”

  We begin our day’s activities with a hike on an old sugar cane road. It’s arduous for me; the trail is really steep and really bumpy. My brother tells me this is the road he used to take people mountain biking on—another service he used to offer with Advanced Recreation. On the way down the hill, he would tell the riders, “Go as fast as you want to fall.” He quit doing this part of his business because of the liability, he says. “Well, didn’t they sign a wavier or something?” I ask. Toby tells me my brother used to do a little trick where he purposefully boinked into a tree and then catapulted over the handlebars into a place he knew would offer a soft landing.  Then all his riders wanted to do it, too. After I hear about one rider’s dislocated shoulder,  I begin to understand the “too much liability” concern. We find things to eat on our walk: thimble berries, oranges, guava. It’s hard to overstate how good it can make you feel to find your food, rather than buy it. I feel like Tarzan’s Jane, only wearing REI hiking boots and sun block.

After our hike, we head into Honaka’a, about ten minutes away, to get groceries for dinner tonight. Honaka’a  has the closest grocery store. They have a movie theater, too, Tobi tells me.  She picked her doctor because he owns the movie theater, which makes no money at all. “They have current shows Friday through Sunday, but the film almost always breaks,” Tobi says. “You just have to expect that. But admission is only six dollars, and popcorn is $1.50. And one night the ticket-taker was handing out free tangerines, and the whole theater smelled like tangerines. Where else are you going to get that? Anyway,” she adds, “the best entertainment here is being outside.”

On the way to town, we stop at Jeff and Tobi’s friend Colleenah Lawrence’s house. Colleenah is, according to Tobi, the best massage therapist on the island, and her very favorite “woo woo” friend. She teaches yoga, too, and knows a lot about healing herbs. She’s a beautiful 57-year old woman with gray hair and a lithe figure, and she seems to have a joyful anticipation that reminds me of kids on their way out to get candy on Halloween night. Collenah has an extensive garden and  a woofer, Tobi tells me, and I think, What else is new? Everybody here seems to have at least one dog. But what Tobi means is that Collenah has  a “Work On Organic Farm For Food” person. They work for a minimum of twenty hours a week, and in exchange are given food and a place to stay, even if it’s only a tent pitched on the land.

We invited Coleenah to dinner and she tells us she’d love to come, but it will have to be after the hula class she takes at the community center. She starts describing the class to us and Tobi and I look over at each other. “Do you want to come?” Collenah asks. Do we ever.  “I’ll stay home and cook,” Jeff says, “and then when you get back, everything will be all ready.” “Okay!” we say.

Also on our way to the grocery store, we stop at what Tobi and Jeff call “salsa and propane.” This is Scoshi World, as the sign proclaims, and you can indeed fill up your tank and buy terrific sauces. But there’s more. Outside the store is a cardboard box full of avocados and tomatillos, free offerings from people who want to share their abundance.  The menu is shaping up to be Mexican.

Down a little alleyway that runs beside Scoshi World is a place called Real Fresh Cookin, owned by Ed Gordon. I taste some of his smoked ahi and swordfish and it is beyond delicious. “You should send some of this to Dad,” I tell Jeff, and he says, “Oh, I do. He loves it.”  I am given a tour of the operation and when I come back out into the alley, I find a baby goat standing on a little table, his owner sitting in a chair beside him. The goat is wearing a collar and a leash, and he has two golf balls affixed to his head.  “What are the golf balls for?” I ask the owner. “Those little horns are sharp,” the guy tells me, and I say, “Oh. I thought they were decoration.”

After the grocery store, we go to a little open air market where the voluptuous displays of fruit and vegetables are as much art as food. Then we visit an upholstery and fabric store called Creative Chaos, which is exactly the right name for it. The shop is like a dusty dreamscape of textiles; it would take a year to properly go thorough all that’s there. Terri, the woman who owns it, is a raconteur and gifted craftsperson whose religion seems to be recycling: one of her products is great-looking shopping bags made from old feed bags. When we arrive, she is working on a sofa up on blocks, and we hear all about how she’s rescuing it using this saved thing and that. Her story is punctuated with: Can you believe they were throwing that away? Later, we see her walking down the street in her long skirt with an umbrella up against the sun, her two little dogs trotting beside her.

Everywhere on this island, I’m coming to see, are characters who would do a novel proud, but there’s nothing fictitious about them: they’re people who have made deliberate choices to lead the often eccentric lifestyles they do. And they radiate a kind of rare happiness and peace. I not only want to know more about them; I kind of want to be them.

Tobi and I drop Jeff off at home to get going on the enchiladas, and then we head for a large classroom in the Hamakua Youth Center where Collenah takes her hula class. We are welcomed by a handsome young native named Lanakila Mangauil, who leads his class of middle-aged women (and one exuberant little girl), most of whom are dressed in jeans and t-shirts bearing slogans or images of kind or another. Some also wear cotton practice hula skirts. These women are not the flat-eyed professionals I saw at a hotel luau last time I came to Hawai’i.  These are women endeavoring to reclaim and take pride in their culture and themselves, and to honor the idea that hula is a way to celebrate life. Lanakila has a most beautiful voice, and he sings the songs in Hawaiian that the women dance to. Every move they make is meaningful, and I know it sounds disingenuous to say this, but these women who favor t-shirts and jeans over push-up coconut bras and grass skirts exude a sensuality that puts those hotel girls to shame.  But the hula is not about sensuality.  Rather it is a sacred art representing history and genealogy. It’s a way to tell a story about the nature around us and inside us. One of the things hula conveys is that something must be broken in order to be remade into something new.  The dance also represents something starting out wild, then being brought under control.  Generally and perhaps most profoundly, hula illustrates basic precepts of Hawaiian philosophy: love, sharing, respect.  At one point, Lanakila talks about the idea of plastic surgery, the way it is such a popular Western practice.  It befuddles him. “Wrinkles are the tattoos of wisdom,” he says.

I came to watch this class thinking I was going to see something funky. But by the end, when Tobi and I are welcomed into the closing circle where everyone holds hands and listens to an incantation in Hawaiian that transcends the need for translation, when we get hugged and kissed by each of the participants as matter-of-factly as if we are shaking hands, I find myself blinking back tears.  The center is a no-fee operation and is threadbare; so few material things, and the need for funds is great. But what is being done here is invaluable.  On the center’s brochure is written: “It is our kuleana [right] and greatest joy to share with the next generation the values of aloha, love; kokua, help/assist; malama, tend/care for; and mahalo, gratitude.” I come away from the experience of being at this place thinking, This is Hawaii.

On the ride back to the house, I talk to Tobi about the fact that so many people here are poor and have so little, but they have so much. “I know,” Tobi says. “They recognize that they’re poor. But it’s not a woe-is-me mentality. It’s just life for them. They are a joyful people.”

At home, Jeff has dinner ready, as promised: guacamole. Salsa with roasted tomatillos and chipotle peppers. Salad with lettuce from his garden. Asparagus and mushroom enchiladas. He makes me the best martini with a twist I’ve ever had. Collenah comes, and so do friends Dallas and Dave Allen, a 60-year old couple who look like prosperous hippies. Dallas wears a beautiful abalone necklace and has braids to help hold back her beautiful long gray hair. After dinner, we all pick our way down to the flat bottom of the back yard to sit in lawn chairs or on blankets and watch a movie. It’s projected onto a screen Jeff has affixed to a wooden lean-to he calls “The Hooch.” This is a place to sit and read or otherwise be alone, except on movie nights when it’s transformed into Tobi and Jeff’s Theater Under the Stars. There’s even a concession stand: I’m offered a choice between  Reese’s peanut butter cups or coconut M&Ms. As I am in Hawai’i, I opt for the coconut, of course. I’m not very far into the film when I feel myself falling asleep. I use the little LED flashlight my brother gave me to pick my way back up the hill and fall into bed, happily exhausted.

On Wednesday, Tobi goes in for half day of work, and Jeff takes me to his favorite place for breakfast: Tex Drive In, on Pakalana Street in Honaka’a. I order what he orders: a loco-moco. This is rice covered by a beef patty (or veggie burger), then an egg, then gravy: comfort food to sustain you through your day. The loco-moco is said to have been invented in the late forties by a compassionate restaurant owner in Hilo who wanted to offer a cheap but nourishing dish to the locals who couldn’t afford much. Tex is famous for its malasadas, fried donuts with various options for fillings, made right there on the premises. The best part about Tex, for me, was their garden, a tourist-worthy display of the abundance of the land, including exotic palms, one of which I peered at and said, “What is this? It looks like it’s gushing out peas!” “Don’t know,” Jeff says. As it happens, we will come to find out in a most delightful way.

Next, we visit Dick and Heather Threlfall’s  Hawaii Island goat farm, where we watch the grown goats out in the pasture butting heads and offering goat kisses to humans, and visit little babies crowding up to the sides of their pens to have a go at sucking your fingers. Dick tells us that he and his wife haven’t had a vacation together in years, because someone must always be on hand to mind the store. “You know what they say,” he says. “You marry a dairy.” We want to buy some goat cheese, but the guy is sold out; even the health food store can’t get it, it’s so popular.

Before we go home, we visit a piece of property owned by Dallas and Dave that overlooks the ocean and shows all the cliff faces and valleys from Waipi'o all the way to Polulu. This is a view that stirs the soul and freezes the tongue. It is aptly named “So Huge,” the idea being that it’s so big there are no words to describe it, so it’s simply called that.  Standing there and looking at that view feels to me like going to church.

We pick up Tobi, then head for the far wall of the Waipi’o Valley, so they can introduce me to the person they want me to meet. On the way, we drive through water, a bumpy adventure that absolutely thrills me. I’m in the front seat this time, and I find myself holding onto the door handle and grinning like a fool as I lurch to the left, to the right, forward and back. I keep thinking: I’m driving up a river! Also I keep thinking: How can anyone live here?

Well. Here’s who lives here: Linda Beech, an 86 year old woman. I know.

Linda, a former actress who had the kind of cool blonde beauty Grace Kelly did, once had the number two television show in Japan, called “Blue Eyes, Tokyo Diary.” She was also: a pilot. A war correspondent who was married to Keyes Beech, himself a correspondent for the Chicago Daily News. A psychologist. And owner of the monkey pod treehouse, which, while no longer is for rent, can still be seen. It was built in 1973 by Steven Oldfather and Eric Johnson, who are normally boat builders, into the branches of the then 175-year old tree. The screened-in treehouse was furnished with an emerald green pull out sofa, two chairs and a table, and had a compost toilet, a shower, and a kitchette complete with sink and hot plate. The view was of rainforest and waterfalls. Suki Casanave, a writer for the Smithsonian, wrote an article in August of 1997 in which she said that for some, spending the night in the Linda Beech’s treehouse “sparked dramatic personal transformations. Those individuals left resolving to change careers, get married, follow long forgotten dreams.” Looking up at the treehouse, even in its current dilapidated state, it seems more an inevitability than a possibility for such things happening there.

Living in the exotic location she does, Linda has experienced some rather exciting times. She has weathered several floods, and in 2002 rising waters made her place inaccessible. She had no food, and relied upon friends swimming across the river to deliver her things to eat—that and her dogs, who brought her avocados. “We’re all vulnerable,” she once said, “and the only way to work it out is through kokua.”

 We go up the steps and into the green wooden house in which she lives, and Linda is sitting on the sofa in her living room. She is beautifully dressed in a Hawaiian print blouse, yellow pants, a yellow bead necklace and two bracelets. Her white hair is carefully styled and her complexion glows.  She tells us about her former life, and her current one, beset now with some health concerns, but she takes this all in stride. She doesn’t complain about anything: rather, she says, “I think we should have some wine!” and we do. We spend a lot of time looking through boxes of newspaper clippings, magazine articles and photographs Linda has collected for a book she’d like to write about her life, and I wish I were a documentary film maker, because a book cannot begin to convey what a surrealistic experience it is meeting her and seeing the place where she lives. When she gave Tobi and Jeff directions to her house the first time they walked the King’s Trail down to see her, she said, “My house is way towards the back of the valley, next to the pali (cliff). After you pass the second waterfall, look toward the left for a little bridge and go over it, then just follow the trail to the house.” Or houses, as it happens. In addition to the art-filled main house of Linda, there are places to stay for the people who live there and help take care of her and the land. One of those people is “Coconut Chris,” whose company we also enjoy briefly.  Chris is a kind of Johnny Appleseed for the island who plants things here, there, and everywhere. He’s a raw vegan who forages for most of his food, and works for Waipi’o on Horseback for the little bit of money he requires. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of everything that grows in this place, and a religious respect for it.

The view from Linda’s living room’s floor-to-ceiling glass wall is of a 2,000 foot lava wall with a waterfall tumbling down it. Her two acre “yard” is full of avocado trees and kukui trees and mango trees, lilikoi vines, dieffenbachia, flowers like red flame ginger and honeycomb heliconia and Queen Emma lilies, and garden spiders who makes designs that look like letters on their webs.  The conversation we enjoy here is of the old-school variety, civilized and rich, devoid of the bouncing knees and darting eyes characteristic of people who are addicted to electronic devices for their entertainment and stimulation. Linda is an avid reader, but her eyesight has begun to fail her (“Just after I bought a brand new Apple computer!” she says) and so I tell her I’ll send her some CDs of books. And chocolate. She licks her lips and smiles happily and I take as a life lesson the fact that she is still so present and appreciative of what life can offer, regardless of the compromises we have to make as we age.  Whomever Linda Beech selects to help her write her memoirs is going to be one lucky person. If the job didn’t require living on the valley floor with her for a year, I’d audition, myself. And I’d restore the treehouse to live in while I did so. 

Linda tells me she adores my brother, who has been sitting in quiet appreciation of her. It’s only as the sun is starting to go down that he is able to tear himself away. When we come out of Linda’s house to get back in the truck, we find two young men standing beside it who look like part of Peter Pan’s cadre of lost boys. Bare chested and wild haired, one is pounding the other’s back. “Hey!” the pounder calls to my brother. “Wanna get detoxified?” “Nah,” Jeff says. “I’m headed up to get intoxicated.”  I decide I’ll need a little intoxication myself after we make the climb out of this valley in the dark. It’s scary enough when you can actually see what you’re doing.

We drive back up the river, then wind around the high narrow roads absent of any light now but the truck’s headlights. Jazz plays low on the truck’s radio, and Tobi tells my brother a little story. “I saw three good things on the way to work today,” she says. “One was two dogs in the back of a truck that looked as happy as I’ve ever been in my life just because they were in the back of a truck. I saw a hawk in a pasture, trying to get lift. And I saw cattle egret swarming out over the highway and back, and I know they did that just for me.” Jeff  also tells a story too, as we slowly inch our way up, up, up. He points to a sign and tells me about the guy who ran into it, then caroomed off the rock wall and plunged down into the ocean. “Really,” I say. And then, “Did you have to tell me that now?” 

            That night, we go into Honaka’a to Café Il Mondo for most excellent pizza. Here are some of the names of the offerings: Honoka'a, Big Island, Waipi’o, Pa’auilo, and Fresco Paradise. On the menu is written, “Reminder: Medium and Large pizzas are available To Go only…They are not served in the Café. Grazie.” I wonder why. I don’t want to ask. I only want to wonder why.

*

            Today’s the day Jeff wants to take me over to Kona and get me up in his trike. For me to fly 12,000 feet up in the open air is about as natural as putting an outboard motor in your pancake mix. But, “Oh, all right,” I say. In the back of my mind, I am thinking I can always say, “You know what? Let me just look at your toy. I don’t need to ride on it.”

            We decide to have lunch at The Harbor House before we go to the airport. As it is what might be my last meal, I go heavy on the French fries with my fish sandwich. And then there is no more delaying: it is time. We go to over to my brother’s hanger, and I feel my heart rate accelerate. My stomach is a little queasy, too, and it isn’t on account of the fish, which was delicious. I actually try to tell myself that today is a good day to die, that if I check out today, I won’t have to suffer the ravages of old age. My children are gown and okay; my dog will find a happy home. Once dead, there’s no more dying then, etc etc.

            When my brother pulls the tarp off his trike, I see that it is an absolutely beautiful machine. The fact that it’s so clean and well cared for makes me feel better about putting my life in the hands of someone I used to think was pretty much incapable of anything but getting more attention than me from our father. Jeff tells me to empty all my pockets—he doesn’t want anything flying out and going into the propeller. He tells me how to get into the back seat without putting my foot where it shouldn’t go. I climb in and put on my seatbelt and the headset he gives me so I can listen in on the conversation between my brother and the control tower, as well as communicate with Jeff when we’re in the air. As we taxi down the runway, I hear the crisply professional instructions being given my brother, the bravo-delta blah blah blah, but mostly I keep reminding myself to breathe. And then we take off.  What absolute exuberance: I feel like a bird. We fly parallel to the coast and I look down at the turquoise ocean and think, This isn't so bad! This is hardly scary at all! And it’s so beautiful! And then my brother says, “Okay, up we go!” and suddenly we are quickly climbing higher and higher—and higher still. I want to say, “Okay, okay now, that’s enough,” but my jaws are frozen shut and also I cannot move anything else. The soundtrack in my head is Oh God, oh God, oh God. But then, gradually, I relax.  I release my grip on the metal whatever-it-is I’ve been holding onto, and rest my hands on my knees. “Anybody ever get up here and change their mind?” I ask. “Only one guy,” Jeff says. “He got up and  then wanted to go right back down. I asked him if he was sure he didn’t want to give it another minute or two. Nope, he said, he wanted to go back down right now. But his girlfriend went up, and she loved it.”  My brother takes pictures of us with a camera he has mounted on the trike, and my favorite will turn out to be the “Look Ma, no hands!” one. I like the ride best when he gets around five hundred feet, and doesn’t take too many turns. When he turns, I confess I have to close my eyes and pretend I’m at home in my bed, reading. 

When we land, I feel a kind of wild joy I haven’t enjoyed since I was a little kid. And a feeling of triumph, as though I’m the one who did all the work. This was a ride of a lifetime, truly. I understand now why people who come back to the island every year always call my brother to book a flight.

From the sublime to the mundane: After my Amelia Earhart experience, we go to Costco for fixings for dinner. They’re selling surfboards there, but also scallops and shrimp and asparagus and baby potatoes that we’ll grill for dinner. We’ll use rosemary from the garden to make the potatoes sing. But when we get home, there’s an important message on the phone. Tonight, on the part of Dave and Dallas’ s land called “Banyan Embrace,” Dave will be doing his flaming poi ball dance.  Once again, Jeff volunteers to stay home and cook, and Tobi and I and the dogs go to enjoy the show.

It’s pitch black outside, and we drive onto pasture land, then use flashlights to find our way to the grove where Dave is dancing. There are banyan tree roots so high they are walls, and it is against them that Dave will perform the show.

He’s not dancing when we first arrive. Instead, people are seated in lawn chairs, visiting with each other, laughing, and enjoying a huge bonfire and snacks laid out on a picnic table. Solar powered lights hang from branches for a festive touch. I am seated next to a young man from Brazil who turns out to be Collenah’s woofer. He’s been all over the world, and is very much enjoying his time here now.  He wants to be a massage therapist when he grows up. What a happy coincidence that he’s a woofer to an expert masseuse, I tell him, and he agrees. I decide I’ll avail myself of her legendary services the very next day.

Suddenly, Dave leaps up and lights  his poi balls on fire. He swings them around in circles, faster and faster, making a kaleidoscopic pattern of light. He throws something into the fire to change the color of the flames. He grabs a baton that he lights on fire at both ends, then twirls. I am mesmerized, and very, very impressed.

And then we hear the sound of a motorcycle. It’s Jeff, come to tell us that dinner is ready. Tobi drives the car back; I climb on the back of Jeff’s motorcycle for a ride that’s way scarier than the trike: my brother likes to drive his motorcycles fast, even if it’s over bumpy pasture land.

But his speed has made it possible for us to arrive at the house ahead of the others, and so we have a little time alone. I am feeling overwhelmed with everything I’ve seen and experienced, especially with the way that Jeff is part of a real chosen family here, with the way that it has so thoroughly grounded him. We were talking earlier about having been Army brats, and I said that I never know how to answer the question, “Where are you from?”  “I don’t really feel I’m from anywhere,” I said. But Jeff said unequivocally, “I’m from here.”

Now I see him standing before me and I think of the baby brother whose pureed plums I ate when I was supposed to be feeding them to him. I remember the little boy to whom I held up a hot pepper and said “Eat this! There’s a prize inside!” I think of the little guy who lay weeping in the bunk bed below me because I had told him a purposely scary story. “Jeff,” I say. “I just want to say I’m so sorry for the way I treated you when we were growing up. I never was the kind of big sister you deserved to have.” I embrace him, weeping a little, and say, “But I love you, and I want to say I’m so happy I got to come and see what you have here.”  Jeff tells me about how it was coming to Hawai’i that opened him up to giving and receiving love. We talk a little about how the difficulties in our family might have contributed to our distance from one another, which I take to mean he absolves me of my sins. And then we hear the sounds of people coming. “Uh oh,” I say. “We’re not going to finish this conversation.”  “We’ll never finish this conversation,” Jeff says, and I believe what he is saying is, “Aloha. Now that we’ve finally met, we’ll always keep talking.”

            We do so much else. We drive through miles of black lava rock on infamous Saddle Road (rental cars not allowed due to the narrowness and areas of poor repair) to see Mauna Kea. On the way, I admire the reaching structure of the wiliwili trees and  enjoy the in-house entertainment: Tobi whips out a harmonica from the glove compartment and plays “Red River Valley,’ and “This Old Man.” She plays a podcast of an episode of a British soap opera called “The Archers” to which she is happily addicted.  She plays a Keb Mo song called “I’m Amazing” which she says she listens to if she ever gets yelled at at work. We laugh at the sight of people coming down from the mountain with shovels sticking out of high piles of snow in the back of their pick-up trucks. They are racing home to quick build a snowman in their yards, or, even better, on the beach.

We go to Hilo, and meander the crowded aisles of the farmer’s market  to see produce on steroids and handmade soaps, bags of Kona coffee, and clothing and jewelry inspired the flora and fauna of the island. We see the historical structures of the Empire Café and the Palace Theater, and the sign on the Donation Station Thrift shop which reads, We are very, very open.

            For lunch, we go to the Café Pesto, which offers seared island poke and a salad called “Volcano Mist.” I go for the hot sandwich called “The Sandalwood,” made with Japanese eggplant, marinated artichokes and sun-dried tomatoes . The cafe also offers great views of street theater: we watch a guy wearing a top hat who has crest-headed poultry and had a coffee can labeled “Chicken Feed.”  We invited a man sitting near us to join our table after I’d peppered him with questions about how and why he came there. (“I got off the plane and that was it,” he said.) The invitation to join us was naturally offered and just as naturally taken in this place of joyful sharing and expected serendipity. We learned that he was Bo-Goran Lundkvist, of Lundkvist Palm Garden. He was interested in building a pole house like Jeff’s and Jeff was interested in acquiring some palms like his. They arranged to meet, and I felt sorry that I wouldn’t be there on that day.  Bo-Goran told me that the exploding peas I saw on in the garden at Tex drive in were seeds.

The best part of Hilo was a flower store that has no name (but is located at 55 Furneaux Lane, phone 808-934-7126), which Tobi simply calls “The Ladies.” Here were the three Ebesugawa Sisters, diminutive and lively caretakers of their shop since the forties. They stood lined up three in a row, threading fuchsia colored orchid blossoms onto strings to make leis. “Don’t make any money from this,” they kept saying, and I thought it must be true. Over seventy-five blossoms are used to make a lei that costs seven dollars . For seven dollars and fifty cents, you could get bouquets that would easily cost over ten times that much on the mainland. And if you talk to the ladies, you’ll get an oral history more satisfying as any bouquet. You’ll hear stories about how one sister wanted to go to college to study medicine, but their father thought girls were meant to stay home, so they stayed home and for fifty years worked in their family’s fruit and vegetable store. (One started at nine years old, one at twelve.) In their seventies, the sisters retired briefly, but found it boring. “When you work, work, work all the time, you become workoholic,” they said. And so they looked around for something to do, and voila: their highly praised flower shop.

            On the one rainy day we had when I was there, I tasted a little Kai lychee nut flavored vodka for breakfast. It was on that morning that I realized I hadn’t combed my hair for three days, that I had become a happy savage.  Jeff took me into town to meet some of his friends: Joe, a stained-glass artist who showed us his beautiful work in his studio and in his house. In his kitchen was an extra-fine example of the foraging that is a way of life here: Joe got his deep, double-sided sink and the stove from an old Dairy Queen. The range’s hood was redolent of hamburger grease, and he had to built a fence around it to keep the dogs away until he could clean and install it.

I said hello to the smiling women at the bank whom Jeff sees often, and I saw Mokie, who hitchhikes into town every day to play his drums for spare change.  Jeff and Tobi often give him a ride in.

At Ted’s gas station, the proprietor sat eating his lunch at his cash register and declined again an offer to go up on Jeff’s trike. Later, he always says. Jeff said that he believes that if you go up on that thing, you’re only asking for trouble. 

Behind the propane and salsa, we visited another friend of Jeff’s named Pete, who lives in a place that photographer Chris Bickford described as “a bachelor’s Shangri-la.” Then he added, “I want to live there.” In the house is an opium den bed, a fat black cat wearing ruby red beads lying imperiously on the back of a chair, a huge outdoor shower with two dolphin heads. Bamboo floors. Stained glass transoms. A changing cast of characters who stay with Pete while he helps them out.  Once when Jeff came to call, Pete wasn’t decent, which is to say he was naked. He put on a chef’s apron and opened the door.

            We drove along the Onomea Bay, and saw more waterfalls than you could shake a stick at. We put wild ginger in the car and soon the intoxicating scent was everywhere.

            For my last night, I stay at the Hilton Waikoloa, where Jeff works. He drives the trams and the boats that transport guests around this huge resort. It’s a beautiful place, complete with a miniature art museum, pink flamingoes, exotic herons that live on the little man-made islands, oceanside restaurants that offer million dollar views of the sunsets, and really nice rooms. Everywhere are bands and hula dancers and places that can guide you to various activities. But I find I miss the non-fancy side of the island; the wild side.

Still, I avail myself of the pleasures of the hotel. I have a drink called a Lava Flow while I watch the sun go down. I have dinner at a bar where a jazz trio plays and where the bartender says of my Jeffery, “Oh, he’s a good man.”  I ride the tram with my brother and I ride the boat with my brother, and in the way that he chats up the riders, I see that the spirit of our grandfather is alive in him, for it was said about our grandfather that “he knew no stranger.”  I see why so many people look him up when they come back to his island. I see, too, that no matter what he is doing,  Jeffery Hoff is having fun. Whether it’s feeding goats or grilling asparagus or lifting off from the runway into a clear blue sky, he is having fun.

The natural beauty of The Big Island is enough to short-circuit your senses. But the real beauty is in its people, who put no barriers between themselves and their natural love and warmth and appreciation for their species.  My brother is one of those people.

[P.S. This just in: I just got an email from Tobi, who told me about a party she went to at the Plantation Manager’s house, a beautiful old mansion that has been restored by the people who live there now.  She writes, Dave did his fire show out on the lawn and he caught on fire on his head (hat) and shorts. But he didn’t miss a beat and the fire went out pretty quickly so not to worry. He had some new moves and it was an excellent show.

She also writes about a last-minute surprise birthday party a man gave his wife:

His house was a mess but he got someone over to help clean up and he got friends from Kona to bring a cake and he got some local ladies to come and dance hula and another guy to play ukulele and another guy to cook pork chops on the grill and one to make guacamole and it was a typical neighborhood thing that just happens here. It was so funny watching the hula ladies (none of them spring chickens) sitting on the lanai and taking swigs from the Crown royal bottle and then laughing, laughing, laughing. My, what a place the Good Lord has allowed me to land!  ]

Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash