The Reluctant Voyager

Dear Reader:

My good friend Albert, the editor of the website, asked me to write a blog on my upcoming trip to the Hawaiian Islands. Why he asked me to do this, I can't imagine, for he knows very well how much I hate to travel.

Let me be honest with you, dear reader: I don't like riding taxis, trains, canoes — any form of conveyance that has the demonstrated capacity to kill or maim. I was well into my twenties before I could ride an escalator comfortably. (It wasn't the height, by the way: it was the big teeth on the metal stairs that could snag your shoelaces and pull you under into the Abyss.) This is one hundred percent true.

And don't get me started on the subject of moving walkways!

To make matters worse, I've never experienced anything remotely like Wanderlust. The Germans invented this word to describe the foolish desire to get out of bed and move about, but I don't have a jot of it — not the tiniest smidgen. It's a matter of complete indifference to me what gods they worship in the Maldives or how they make eggs in Kiribati. In fact, the folkways of distant peoples leave me with a cold, empty feeling. The last time I saw a Mexican hat dance, I fell into a depression that lasted for several months.

It's a clear measure of Albert's perversity that he asked me to write about my travels. This, in my opinion, is a very mean trick he's playing on you, his readers. I assured him the results would be less than spectacular. Nevertheless, because I owe him a debt for a small favor he once did me, I will comply with his strange request.

But you, dear reader, deserve much better.

In two weeks, my traveling partner Peter and I leave for the Island of Kauai. This will not be the first time Peter has dragged me halfway across the world to make a complete ass of myself. I go partly to please him, partly to escape this brutal Mid Atlantic winter. I go mostly, I suppose, because I won't be able to live with myself unless I do.

Aloha!

Dear Reader:

I've been studying — notice I say studying, not learning — the Hawaiian language.

Peter assures me they speak English in the Islands, but I don't trust him. He made the same claim about the Berbers of Morocco, and there I was, in the middle of the Sahara with a sandstorm whipping up from the south, my stomach aching from a bad tagine, surrounded by a herd of angry dromedaries — but that's a story for another day.

If I can manage to learn the Hawaiian words for “gin,” “olive,” and “martini glass,” I will be very happy. Trouble is, I'm as good a language-learner as I am a tuba player, which is to say, not any good at all. But the memory of the time with the camels spurs me on ...

It's difficult to describe the experience of hearing the Hawaiian language for the first time. Initially, I wondered if the native speakers on my tapes were suffering from the hiccups. Their voices would stop unexpectedly then lurch forward, only to stop again without apparent provocation. This hiccupping, it turns out, is the effect of the glottal stops that permeate the language, like lumps of half-cooked carrot in an otherwise smooth broth.

A closer examination of the Hawaiian alphabet reveals how lean it is — a mere 17 sounds, more than half of them vowels! And what spineless consonants: the boneless l and w; the tentative m and n, little more than buzzings in the nose; and the airy h, blowing like a soft trade wind over the rest of the alphabet. It's an odd picture that forms in my mind of these beautiful, stout-hearted men and women humming and yodeling to one another against a backdrop of erupting volcanoes. The greater puzzle, perhaps, is how English speakers make so many sounds yet often manage to mean so very little.

Hawaiian texts are constructed from words almost as long as the things they name. Scanning a Hawaiian sentence, one feels like a small bird flying over a rolling sea of vowels, with thousands of miles to go before breathless landfall on the nearest consonant.

My head aching, I put down my books and tapes and nod off. But then a thought wakes me with a start: the camels! the camels!

Dear Reader:

I'm writing this from Dulles Airport, just outside of Washington, DC. I'm so doped on tranquilizers I can barely push the shift key.

Mrs. Mae Kanna, a resident of the Island of Kauai, is sitting next to me, stroking my arm to calm my nerves. I made her acquaintance after helping her locate her wandering eight-year-old daughter.

Mrs. Kanna is a sweet, round-faced woman in her 40s [she sees me type this and laughs, saying she can't remember what it was like to be forty-something]. She understands my fear of flying, having a touch of it herself.

Mrs. Kanna told me that she once asked her husband, a physics professor at the University of Hawaii, to explain in simple language how airplanes stay aloft. According to her, "He blew on a little piece of paper to make it go up and down, then he said something about an Italian mathematician — Gato Barbieri, I think it was. What am I supposed to say to him, this brilliant man?"

Mrs. Kanna was clearly unimpressed.

"Any idiot knows an airplane weighs more than a little piece of paper," she added. She looked to me for confirmation, and since her logic was impeccable, I agreed. Of course, this did little to settle my nerves.

As I sit here writing, I notice that my traveling companion, Peter, has gone missing. The last time I saw him, he was flirting with the young clerk at the Cinnabon counter. Will he miss his flight for the promise of banging a pimply Gen X-er with sugar bits in his goatee? Why does he always do this?

And what if Mrs. Kanna is right? What if airplanes one day realize they really have no good reason for staying up in the air? If Peter ever decides to show up, I'm fairly certain we're all going to die.

I clutch to my breast the lucky charm my nephew Stephen gave me: a little green plastic soldier with a parachute

* * *

Postscript to that last blog entry:

I'm better now, dear reader. I apologize for getting so carried away.

It's not just the airplane thing that has destroyed my nerves — and this in spite of a kilogram of Valium. Now I'm a little worried about this thing with the god Lono. Let me explain.

Mrs. Kanna, a native Hawaiian, has been telling me about the chain of misunderstandings that led to Captain Cook's being clubbed to death on the Island of Kauai. For those of you unfamiliar with Hawaiian history — as I was, just a few minutes ago — Captain Cook is credited by European historians as the "discoverer" of the Hawaiian Islands. It's silly, of course, to attribute to Cook the discovery of islands that had been populated for hundreds of years, but you know what I mean.

According to Mrs. Kanna, some "f*ckheads" (she has a real potty mouth) mistook Captain Cook for the god Lono, ruler of the clouds and storms. It's a sign of the generous nature of the Hawaiian people that they would welcome an English sailor with bad teeth as a god.

In any event, things went well at first for Cook and his men. The natives offered them bark cloth, feather leis, chickens, hogs, bananas, wooden bowls, taro, and yams. Cook repaid them with mirrors, necklaces, and iron. But then he spoiled the deal by throwing fleas and syphilis into the bargain.

"By this time, my people were on to him," winked Mrs. Kanna.

Then things went from bad to worse. It's hard for me to keep Mrs. Kanna's story straight in my head, but apparently one of the chiefs of the island, a certain Paleo, stopped believing that Cook was the god Lono. So he decided to appropriate a boat from Cook's ship — perhaps to even out the exchange of goods, who knows? Cook was displeased, and the next day he and some officers went ashore to request that the ruling chief, Kalaniopuu, be held on board Cook's ship until the boat was returned. For some reason that I can't begin to fathom, Kalaniopuu agreed. But, as he was making for the ship, he learned that another chief, Kalimu, had just been shot by Cook's men. Fearing for his own safety, Kalaniopuu decided to hightail it to an undisclosed location. When Cook attempted to stop the ruling chief, all hell broke loose. A fight ensued, and Cook and four other haole (white men) were clubbed on the head until they lay dead on the shore.

Got all that?

That's how Mrs. Kanna tells the story. What worries me is not the fact that Captain Cook was killed — although being done in by a bowling pin seems an especially gruesome and ignoble way to go. And I'm not concerned that the natives subsequently stripped the flesh from Cook's bones and threw it on a fire. Not much, anyway.

What worries me is how quickly a simple gift exchange turned ugly, fueled as it was by a few cultural misunderstandings.

Prior to his being filleted, Captain Cook had been invited to the place of honor in Lono's heiau (temple). I take it this was the high point of his relationship with the islanders, when he was still widely regarded as an avatar of the god. The chief priest had wrapped a beautiful cloth around Cook's shoulders and paid him homage. But did Cook understand the high pedestal on which he was being placed, and how long a fall it would be to the sharp lava at its base? For all Cook knew of the Hawaiian language, the chief priest could have been reciting his favorite poi recipes, or perhaps making pleasantries about the weather.

What then will become of me in Hawaii, a complete cultural imbecile?

When I shared my concerns with Mrs. Kanna, she laughed. "Lono is the lord of the sun and of wisdom. He's a strong and beautiful man!" she exclaimed, lifting her hands above her head. "Don't worry, Pilik," she said (she pronounced my name Pilik), "There's no way you'll ever be mistaken for a god!"

Dear Reader:

We're flying! We're flying! A little dust mote in a big blue sky. A little dust mote that weighs a million pounds and has wings and a lovely cart brimming with lime wedges and little blue bottles of gin, thank Merciful God! I've been beveraged so many times that my tongue falls out of my head every time I open my mouth to speak. People are beginning to notice.

The label on my vial of tranquilizers cautions me that alcohol might intensify their effect. A friend once pointed out to me that this sounded more like a serving suggestion than a warning.

Speaking of friends, Peter finally showed up. He's sitting behind me, cutting out the ad for the rotary nose hair clippers from his in-flight magazine. He says he's going to send it to an uncle in Potsdam. Mrs. Kanna is sitting somewhere in the back of the plane with her daughter.

I'm sitting next to a man who has very bad breath and who's snoring loudly. I think it might be possible to toss a breath mint into his open mouth while nobody else is looking. Stay tuned ...

* * *

This is embarrassing.

I spilled a cold drink on the lap of the man next to me and woke him just as I was attempting to throw a Tic Tac into his mouth. It bounced off his teeth and landed in his beer. He's still very irate, even though I offered to pay for the beer.

Mrs. Kanna stopped by to say hello, wondering what all the fuss was about. She told me I could see the Big Island from the right side of the plane.

I was stunned when I looked out my window. The Big Island is certainly worthy of the name, but there is a hell of a lot of space around it! The maps Peter showed me had Hawaii's six islands squeezed amiably together, with never more than a few inches between them. This was very comforting to me — I don't know why. I suppose that if there were an uprising on one of the islands, or it sank, I'd have a chance of making it to the next one. But here we were, flying away from the western edge of the Big Island, with nothing but Giant Squid habitat beneath us!

Now I'm beginning to think Peter might have tricked me into believing the islands were closer together than they really are. It's just the kind of thing he would do.

* * *

Dear Reader:

Landfall at last! I'm so happy to be on solid ground that I don't even mind the fact that they lost my luggage!

I do feel out of sorts, however. I just bade a tearful goodbye to Mrs. Kanna and her daughter. She gave me her address and phone number and told me to give her a call after I settled in. "Get a grip, Pilik," she said. "You look like you've just delivered twins."

She's right. And my clothes reek of gin — I'm a total mess. Peter's gone off to buy me a fresh outfit while I write this blog. I won't even light a cigarette, fearing that I might burst into flames if I do.

And what is it about Lihue Airport that sets me on edge? I think it's the fact that it looks like a suite of dentists' offices. That, and the smell of flying anxiety, and the lost luggage, and the perky way they say "b-bye" as you leave the plane, and the fact that for the past twelve hours I've been wedged into a seat that's barely large enough for a paramecium.

I feel something else too: life returning to my body. The warmth of the island is beginning to thaw my cold Yankee heart.

I'm reminded of the story of the Hawaiian medicine man who had a special talent for calling back souls that had been separated from their bodies. He would seize a wandering spirit then struggle with it until he managed to align its insteps with the insteps of the body it had only recently abandoned. The medicine man would then work his way upward, reanimating first the legs, then the torso and arms, and finally the head — kind of like the way one might seal a Ziplock bag.

Can it be that I'm falling under the spell of the swaying palms?

* * *

Peter just returned from the airport's souvenir shop with my new ensemble: a beige tee-shirt with a picture of some ghastly fish on it, and a pair of brightly-patterned Bermuda shorts. He's mad! The fish, Peter tells me, is something the locals call a humu-humu-nuku-nuku-apua'a, a daunting name for an animal that's nine inches from head to tail when fully grown!

I tried the shirt on, and even though it's sized XX-L, my belly hangs out the bottom. The poor fish looks like it's been beached on an enormous sandbar. The shorts are no better, providing a colorful frame for the varicose veins in my pale, spindly legs.

Frankly, I look just awful — the embodiment of Anti-Fashion. If I were perchance to collide with a well-dressed person, we'd cancel each other out and disappear in a burst of X-rays.

Part II of Heartbreak and Hysteria in the Hawaiian Islands:   One-Finger Poi