I Ulu I Ka Aina: Land

Crossing the Pali

110 We’re all young enough to remember what it was like when we were growing up in Hilo small town or Kāne‘ohe where it rained rivers of red dirt in the winter from all the new cut hillsides. There’s still the suggestion of old streams and lo‘i under the sunken lawns. My grandfather had a house stepping down to a small stream hidden like a secret, the shy green spring of a young girl flowing in the shade of a mango tree. Years later we went away to college climbing the peaks of Western thought. But I remember the stories— my uncle sleeping on the beach in a hole lined with newspaper, his youngest brother not far away in his own hole for the night. In the morning they gathered coconuts that had fallen from the night sky. On the other side of the island, my mother’s popo is cooking bird’s nest soup in the kitchen. One of my father’s sisters had a husband who used to twirl Crossing the Pali Dana Nāone Hall Hall | 111 knives for the Samoan fire dance, which he perfected and later performed somewhere on the East Coast. Another sister lived in Maple Shade, New Jersey, while the rest of us grew thick as bamboo in Kāne‘ohe. These people are still around like the brightly colored fish swimming in the aquarium at my grand-aunt’s house in Kaimukī. I know that you have the same kinds of stories lined up the way you used to line up with your father, mother and brothers all in a row at St. Joseph’s on Sundays. Now you’re an attorney and you act different. You part your hair in the middle. You look like you never get enough sleep. You’re almost always in an office, twenty-seventh floor, air conditioning, mirrored windows, in downtown Honolulu, and you think the guys riding around with big tires and tinted glass are funny. Look at you, you don’t go to the beach, you say you don’t have fun, you work too hard and for what? So the big Japanese company can carve up the coast like so much raw tuna. Very refreshing with a little Kirin after a round of golf. Meanwhile another company from Wyoming wants to drill deep into the mountain directly 112 | I Ulu i ka ‘Āina above your client’s new resort to extract high-temperature steam for electricity. Never mind that the gases escaping with the steam will smell like rotten eggs. Worry about that when the time comes. It’s almost midnight on the day when you questioned me for more than six hours about my interest in keeping the old road in Mākena open to traffic of all kinds. All the while, hammering away for the developer who wants everybody off the beach before the hotel opens in late summer. It’s almost midnight under the same moon. Who says you have to go along with it? ...