We were made, eventually, to pray to it, whether we wanted to or not. Your father and I still pray to it now.
Take language. ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i, which was not written, only passed from one mouth to the next, less letters than the English that soon roared over it, and yet it contained more mana of Hawai‘i than anything that foreign tongue could twist itself into. What do you do when pono, a healing word, a power word—a word that is emotions and relationships and objects and the past and the present and the future, a thousand prayers all at once, worth eighty-three of the words from the English (righteousness, morality, prosperity, excellence, assets, carefulness, resources, fortune, necessity, hope, and on and on)—is outlawed? When our language, ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i, was outlawed, so our gods went, so prayers went, so ideas went, so the island went.
Take you, my son. You are not a god, but there is something that moves through you that may be one. Does it revive what came before, or build something new? I can’t say.
But when you returned from Portland with a broken hope I did my best to help. It’s hard to guide what you can’t feel, and there are so many days in this modern Hawai‘i in which I don’t feel anything. But when you are near, there is something, just under the surface, that I can feel. It is bright and warm and ready, but I can feel it, like a gentle swell of the ocean that contains a million pounds of power underneath.
And so I encouraged you to visit the valley, it’s true. I trusted in what you were feeling, and that to follow that feeling would hopefully bring forth that which was inside you. See that? Hope can be a god as well. It’s something that can be prayed to.
17
NAINOA, 2008
Waipi‘o Valley
Two days out and I’m still walking, still feeling the call, the gravity, ever stronger every day. I’m here, the Big Island, heading up out of Waimanu Valley, second valley after Waipi‘o, heavy with the feeling I will find something, just around the next turn, just behind the hala trees and on into the gritty mud of the trail, all the mosquitoes and flies tickling my skin, scattering from my slap.
The sun hasn’t broken through and the gray smears of cloud rush past, the gusts make the bushes sizzle. I’m nearing the ridge, the point past which almost no one visits, out of this side of Waimanu and into the valleys beyond that have no name, it is said to be a broken and impossible path. I step up into the mist and muck and swing my machete, and I walk and I hack, knowing if I keep going something will be revealed, that I can finally understand what I should become.
At dusk it’s clear that I’m not alone. I’ve been bushwhacking for hours, stomping and slashing, the folds of my shirt flapping with sweat, when I break through a heavier section of branches into a clearing. It’s more space than I’ve felt since the morning, and I can smell the eggy metallic scent of a lit camping stove. Fifty feet away there is a shack, the boards lepered with moss, the tin roof copper with rust and blanketed in leaves and twigs. There is no window on this side, but I hear a murmur of voices and so make my way across the clearing.
When I am close enough I circle around to the front of the shack. It has an official bearing, perhaps a building once used to shelter park rangers or trail crews or rescue workers. The front wall has collapsed in sections, complete chunks gone like a house in a war, so that you can see through large holes into the room inside, it looks warm and dry, and even if the wood floor is rotting, it’s certainly soft.
Pale fluorescent light flashes through the holes and I hear the voices clearer now, a European language of some sort. The light turns full into my face and I hold up a hand to shield my eyes against the blast of white.
“Yes, okay, hello,” a man’s voice, thickly accented, comes from the inside of the shack. “What does he want with the machete, don’t come closer.”
“I heard you from the trail,” I say. It sounds apologetic, but the light remains blinding in my eyes. I step toward the door.
“Stop,” the man says, and I do.
There is a series of whispers that slash back and forth between the man and someone else, a higher and rounder voice that sounds like a woman.
“Can’t I come in?” I say. “I’ve been sleeping in the dirt for the last two days. I’m very tired.”
More whispering.
“Maybe tell us something.”
“Tell you what?”
“From where you are coming, what trail you were on, these things maybe.”
I sigh, leave one hand up, still blocking the light from hitting my eyes. “I’m from here,” I say. “I grew up in Honoka‘a.”
“And the—”
“—I’ve been on the trail starting at Waipi‘o. It gets very thick coming out of Waimanu. I’ve had to hack my way out to get here.”
They whisper again; I don’t wait, I don’t care, I pitch the machete through one of the holes in the wall and the clang of it on the floor stops their discussion. “You keep it for the night if you need it.”
With the blade out of my hands, whoever’s inside is satisfied. The light swings away from my face and I’m able to step up to the front door and enter. Bare walls, grim-frosted windows, a small wooden table where the man and the woman are sitting.
Even above the thick smell of mildew, I can smell the couple. It’s an organic stink, like a pile of compost in the sun, lemon peels and old coffee and vinegar, and I can’t help but think, Fucking haoles. It’s the way Dean would have put it if he were here: he’d always bought the local perception of white people—hopelessly ignorant, awkward, dirty—and as much as I resist the stereotype, sometimes it smashes itself in my face. The man with his dark, tangled hair pulled back into a stumpy ponytail, a pubic beard crawling his throat, hunched at the table like a new kid at school, then the woman’s blond hair, hacked boy-short, frames her mouth, a crooked fence of teeth I see while she whispers. Both are vaguely athletic, piercings across their faces—all their ears, he the eyebrow, she the nose and lip—and they have dark-blue circles of sleeplessness around their eye sockets.
Their camping stove, basically a small metal fist, continues hissing. Battered metal plates and utensils are cluttered around it. I gesture at the table; they nod and I sit. I slip free from my pack, and when I do exhaustion slides over me, pulls at my eyelids, I lean my head down into my crossed arms and rest it there, trying not to fall asleep.
“Are you taking a meal, perhaps?” the man asks.
I raise my head and stumble through a response, yes I do eat and I haven’t eaten, I have some things here and should probably start, and I unzip my bag and withdraw wadded clothing, finding my own small pot underneath. I’ve stored some of my meals inside the pot—packages of mac and cheese, tins of tuna, a small, crackling rainbow bag of candy—and they spill out when I open it on the table.
“No no no,” the woman says, smiling. “We can eat some with you. It’s not needed.”
“It’s always needed,” I say. I offer up a tin of tuna, the man shrugs and slides the tin to their side of the table, then we all sit and watch the pot belch steam.
* * *
EVENTUALLY, THE MAN SPEAKS. Our stomachs are full now with the heat of the pasta, tang of tuna. We’d said few words about ourselves while eating, talking first about the trail. They’d started out days ahead of me, their intention to cross all the valleys to Pololu, except about a day’s journey farther up the trail its condition became so degraded and unstructured they were certain it would kill them if they continued. They were Germans, on the island for another week and a half before visiting bits of the mainland as they made their slow way home to Munich. As we talked now the woman, Saskia, loosened up, she mentioned how much she wanted to see the volcano, asked me about my “child-time” in Hawai‘i. She talked with her mouth open and scratched her armpit, she was blond, and yet when I saw Saskia it was Khadeja that was there, not because they were at all the same but because of the way I could feel her presence on Lukas, as if the very air between them was filled with invisible threads that stitched them to one another. They could stand and carry plates away to the dilapidated shelves, or step outside to relieve themselves, and yet you’d feel each one’s attention to the other tugged along. In it I recognized what I had, too, Khadeja and Rika, and memories tumbled down and stacked on each other so that I was playing pool at an ashy bar with Khadeja just before closing time, watching her lean over the pool table, the way her lips parted just slightly while she focused and her fingers delicated the cue, those same fingers she’d use to brush an eyelash from Rika’s eye when we were all on our way back from a picnic at the park, smelling of sandwich turkey and lazily full of afternoon sun.