The Reluctant Voyager

Dear Reader:

I'm writing this blog from a cottage just a little ways inland from Kapaa.

It was a lovely drive from the airport. Those palms! And the sedating warmth that embraces you, and caresses you, and tells you that perhaps it's a very good thing to be alive after all. I could tell by the dreamy look in Peter's eyes that I had lost him completely. Were it not for the calcium in his bones, he would have melted to the floorboards in a gooey puddle of protoplasm.

Kapaa is a pretty little town, struggling, as all little towns do, against the encroachment of strip malls and chain stores. Take one of the inland roads, however, and the scenery changes significantly. The higher you climb, the lovelier it becomes, until at one point a beautiful stretch of the Pacific comes into view.

Nothing has been as I expected. When we stepped off the plane, no beautiful girls in grass skirts approached us to lay garlands of flowers around our necks. When I mentioned this to Peter, he snapped out of his coma long enough to say, "You think the locals have nothing better to do all day than sit around making you wreathes of flowers?"

He has a point.

"Go back to your daydream, you crabby cow," I told him. I don't think he heard me.

Dear Reader:

I'm in the cottage again, enjoying the strange twittering of the birds while I wait for my luggage to arrive. Peter has gone off in search of fresh pineapple and condoms.

I should tell you something about my friend Peter. By day, he's an office drudge, like me. By night, he tops out his credit cards on beauty products, trendy clothes, and Internet pornography.

Peter moved to the District of Columbia from Tulsa to erase, as he put it, "the memory of having grown up in a Republican home." His must have been the only Jewish farm family in all of Oklahoma. And why his parents named him Peter, I'll never know.

I suppose he would have succeeded in the family business. For three years running he was the state champion calf-roper, and he's always had a way with plants. His apartment is filled to the rafters with wonderful growing things — that and photographs of naked men in languorous poses holding pythons and other dangerous animals.

We were born on the same day — he's a few hours older than I am. The similarities end there, however. Peter is tall and green-eyed and handsome, with delicate curly blond hair. God used the choicest parts when He made Peter. When the Almighty discovered He was going to be one human short of His quota, He swept the floor of His workshop and used those bits to make me. I'm not kidding, dear reader: I'm one ugly so-and-so!

There is one annoying thing about Peter: he keeps insisting that I'm gay. I should never have told him that I once had an erotic dream about Omar Sharif.

It was a difficult night, dear reader. I kept hearing animal noises outside our window, and I was convinced a bear was trying to break in to eat our Fig Newtons. Peter assured me there were no wild land mammals on the island — unless, of course, one counted the rats, and the strange little man at the airport who tried to sell me a string of Japanese lanterns.

Tomorrow: The Na Pali coast!

I have so much to tell you, dear reader, I don't know where to begin!

I'm a complete mess: an exhausted ball of red dirt with blisters the size of Carol Channing's teeth! I'm convinced that I won't survive the day, but at least I saw the MOST BEAUTIFUL PLACE ON EARTH before I died and left all my 78s to that ungrateful godson in Boston who never writes!

The Kalalau Trail on the Na Pali coast is reputed to be the sine qua non of hiking. But can you imagine what it takes to make a hiker out of me? There was poor Peter, compelled to play the part of Sisyphus, rolling a huge stone—that would be me—up hill after hill. It was only the extraordinary beauty of the place that kept my mind off the pain. That and handful after handful of Oxycontins.

And yet, how delicately the trail begins, up a slope covered with lovely green and orange mosses. Tiny ferns grow astride the rocks that line the footpath. The light is clear, touched with a limpid blue and yellow, and the air carries the freshness of the nearby surf. It's all very quiet, save for the morning songs of small, brightly colored birds, and me, of course, huffing and puffing like an asthmatic in a room filled with chain smokers. Further along the trail, the canopy of Ohia trees begins to open. You lose your breath when the sun breaks over the peaks to your left, pushing the mist into the valley below. For the first time you catch a glimpse of the rugged coast: fluted cliffs of lava carved by wind and rain, falling vertically into the crashing waves below. Everywhere there's a riot of lush green. It's this landscape that makes the Na Pali coast famous.

Peter and I simply stood there, drinking it all in, quietly weeping.

Dear Reader:

Mrs. Kanna called this morning. She invited Peter and me to a luau in honor of her nephew's Bar Mitzvah. I asked her what we should wear. "It's traditional for the men to come dressed like ducks," she said.

We gladly accepted. I hope to God she's kidding about the ducks.

Dear Reader:

We had a wonderful—albeit strange—time at Mrs. Kanna's luau. Peter, as always, was the belle of the ball. He was a shameless flirt. Mrs. Kanna was radiant. She wore a white, ankle-length muu muu ("Bought it on sale at Hilo Hattie's," she said), and a lovely double-stranded lei of purple orchids. Mrs. Kanna's family was very warm and welcoming.

And what a spread! Table after table covered with white cloths and ferns and beautiful tropical leaves. And the food! Every kind of fish you can imagine, and platters of meat, and "one-finger" poi — so called because it's thick enough to scoop up with one finger.

I got to talking with one of Mrs. Kanna's distant cousins, a fellow named Keona whose name in Hawaiian means "God's gracious gift." Keona had a quirky sense of humor. He played with his food while he talked, creating little poi villages on his plate and inhabiting them with "fish people," as he called them. Mrs. Kanna tried to intervene several times, but I was hooked on the fellow. The more he drank, the wilder the conversation became. Since I was already nine sheets to the wind, it all made a lot of sense somehow:

"Are there many gay people in Washington?" Keona asked through a mouthful of salt fish.

"Yep," I said, "About half the people. The place is crawling with homosexuals." I didn't know the exact number, so I had to guess. "My friend Peter's gay, you know."

Keona's eyes opened wide. "The guy with the pink flip-flops? No kidding!" Keona rubbed his forehead with a greasy hand. "He doesn't look gay," he said in a low voice.

"What does a gay man look like?" I asked him.

"Like the Village People," Keona answered, conspiratorially.

"All of them?" I asked, matching his tone. We had a good laugh at that one — don't know why, it just seemed funny at the time. Now that I think about it, expecting all gay men to look like the Village People is kind of like expecting all Hawaiians to look like Don Ho.

"Hey, Pilik," Keona said, giving me the elbow, "I think Laura Bush is hot." He took another bite of his fish. "She's got great legs."

"I hear she used to be a champion kick boxer," I told him.

"This is 2004, Pilik," he said solemnly. "A woman needs to know how to defend herself."

I turned this over in my mind. Would a woman surrounded by half a battalion of Secret Service agents ever need to defend herself? True enough, Washington, DC had a reputation for being a dangerous city. But judging from the arrest records, all Laura Bush needed to do to stay safe in Washington was steer clear of members of Congress.

After a while, I settled back to watch Peter dance. Where on God's earth did he learn to twirl flaming sticks?

Dear Reader:

It's my obscene luck to be traveling not with a human being, but with a perpetual motion machine! Peter just won't stop! Take me to the warm side of the island, I begged him, sit me down in front of a two-liter girl drink. I can spend the entire day playing with the little paper umbrellas!

He wouldn't have it. We were off again this morning to a place called Waimea Canyon. I told Peter that this sounded like a big hole in the ground. "That's exactly what it is," he said. And that's exactly what it was, except that there are holes and then there are holes ...

Over millions of years, the Waimea-Poomau River cut an enormous trench down the western side of the island. I would be lying, dear reader, if I told you I wasn't moved when I saw it. And it would be foolish of me to compare it with its more famous, steroid-enhanced cousin in northern Arizona. Situated on the leeward side of the island, the Waimea region is an arid place. The road to it passes through strange Tatooine-like landscapes of bright red earthen mounds and blasted trees. The Canyon itself calls to mind a hot dog bun that's been wedged open and slathered with Velveeta cheese and capers—except that the Canyon is inedible and much, much bigger.

Further upcountry there's a beautiful state park providing access to the mythic Alakai Swamp. I shared with Peter the story of the fabulous Hawaiian Queen Emma. The way I heard it, when Kamehameha IV made a widow of the queen, she ventured into the Swamp with an enormous retinue, stopping every now and then to sing a dirge and dance the hula. At first, she traveled on horseback, but when the going got rough, her attendants dutifully carried her through the all-but-impenetrable bog.

"Don't get any ideas," Peter told me. "I'm not carrying you through this swamp." I wasn't going to ask Peter to do this, but it would have been nice of him to offer.

We spent a lovely morning wandering through forests of giant tree ferns and meadows of wild ginger. Peter kept up his strength by eating the wild guavas and passion fruits that grew along the trail. He offered some to me, but I refused them, wondering aloud about the number of dogs that had urinated on these delicacies before they chanced to pass his lips. "It's an extraordinary dog," Peter said, "that can manage to project his piss ten feet into the air."

I've watched the World's Funniest Animals, dear reader, and I know what dogs are capable of. Unlike me, Peter did not see the Dalmatian in Granite Falls, Idaho, who could whistle Embraceable You while wearing a funny hat and standing on his hind legs.

Dear Reader:

It was an eerie day. We visited the beautiful Keahua Arboretum, but when we were ready to leave, we discovered that our car wouldn't start. I was ready to call the rental agency when Peter proposed another tack. He had been reading about Hawaiian religious rituals, and he suggested that we make an offering to appease the god of the forest.

I was appalled when Peter began scattering the contents of our super-size bag of pork rinds on the ground. "Pig sacrifices are common," he offered by way of explanation.

"What kind of god would demand of us our pork rinds?!" I shouted at Peter as he got into the car and—to my amazement—revved the motor.

Now I'm not a religious man, dear reader, but this defied explanation. I can only hope the gods never develop a taste for Ben & Jerry's.

Tomorrow we fly to the Big Island.

Is this how my life will end, dear reader? Why did Peter wait this long to tell me that our destination is absolutely crawling with live volcanoes?

My mind is reeling. We're talking about MOLTEN ROCK spewing out of the earth at an unimaginable 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. I tried a scientific experiment when Peter told me the news. I found a stone in our front garden and tried to melt it with my Bic lighter. Impossible! And you know how hot one of those lighters can get. What kind of heat must it take to melt a rock, for God's sake?

Peter says it's perfectly safe, but how can I trust him? He's such a daredevil. He once attended a 700 Club fundraiser wearing his yarmulke and a tee-shirt with the words, "Outlaw Temple Prostitution."

Part III of Heartbreak and Hysteria in the Hawaiian Islands:   Encounter With Madame Pele