Kanikapila

This winter has really been unpleasant here in North Carolina. Not that much snow, which I feel makes it pretty and sparkly at least, but dreary, wet, and cold. The kind of cold that seeps into your bones and stays there unless you do something drastic like heartily scrub the bathtub or stand at your workbench sanding two or three guitars while practicing a tap dance. The chance to fly away to Hawaii in February to teach an inlay class truly couldn't have come soon enough. I was a bit anxious as I had only interacted with Paul's friend Edmond via email, but since getting to know my friend Paul and teaching at his house last year went so well, I figured it was probably ok. I mean, how many serial killers are into an obscure hobby along the lines of ukulele building and offer to pick you up at the airport and let you stay in their guest cottage halfway up the side of a volcano in Hawaii...right?

As we stood with other weary passengers, watching bulky luggage trundle its way around the baggage claim carousel, a tall man in a flannel shirt and jeans walks up to me. "Jayne?" he exclaims. Surprised I look up, thinking, who on earth would recognize me in this airport so far from anyone I know? Though, when leading paddling trips in Alaska, once I boarded the participant's bus to pass out safety waivers and a couple I had worked at a summer camp with in Asheville were seated in the back row so I guess it is possible someone would know me in Hawaii, too. "I'm Edmond," the man tells me, shaking my hand. How he chose me and Nick from a throng of tired, disheveled travelers I have no idea. It's not like I was the only one sitting there with a ukulele. While he explained that he had seen a picture of me from when I taught Paul's class, I just thought, wow he has a really thick accent, I wonder where he's from. Later, when I asked, he answered that he was born on Maui. Confused but equally exhausted from the long day of travel, I just nodded and followed him to the parking lot.

Due to weather in Atlanta we weren't able to fly out on Wednesday as we had planned, so we missed our exploring/settle in day that I had worked in to account for jetlag and settling in. No matter, after arriving Thursday, we ended up finding time to do some sight seeing around the class time anyway.

On one of the days I was teaching my class, Nick had planned to bike to the top of the volcano that shaped Maui, a 10,000+ foot mountain of steep incline named Haleakala, if the weather cooperated with such an endeavor. He stuffed his own bike parts and helmet into his carry on bag and reserved a bike at a shop at the base of the mountain. When we awoke Friday morning, light clouds dotted the bright blue sky, so while we didn't get our day to rest from travel, we still got up early and set about our respective adventures. As I set about preparing for a couple days of inlay class, off he hurried to the cycle shop in town to procure his bicycle.

Back in Edmond's cozy, cluttered shop, I sat organizing my materials and counting out my saw blades, I watched each of the participants shuffle in and choose a workspace. Something I love about humanity is that everyone has a story to share. I find it important to consider that each person I encounter has a history; I love wondering where they've been, what they like to do, where they were born, who their family is. Having two days to hang out with eight students,  I looked forward to getting to know them. I suppose that is a main reason why I am so reluctant to allow a third party to sell my instruments for me. Even though there's that rare time I don't enjoy dealing with a difficult client, usually getting to know the people who ask me to make something for them is the best part of my job.

The first guy to arrive and plunk his stuff down on the wooden workbench was Keith. He looked like the quintessential stickler grandfather; blue tracksuit swishing as he set up his station, tight haircut, prepared to jump in and help if necessary. The type of guy who acts like he runs a tight ship, but really, I bet those grandkids could get away with anything if they tried it. He immediately offered to help me prep for the class, cutting out inlay patterns and organizing the squares of paper in neat rows. David, Edmond's neighbor and close friend who took my class the previous year and was a significant catalyst for getting this class going, perched on a stool by a workbench at the back of the room. Another fellow slowly walks in and sits at a third table set up in the room. Judging by this neon colored t-shirt and his laid back movements, he looks as though not much phases him or causes significant concern. He told me his name was Randy. At that same table, a little guy who introduced himself as Ed, sits next to his friend Russell. Ed is obviously somewhat older than Russell, and judging by Russell's Patagonia fleece and tailored outfit and Ed's more relaxed button down and jeans, I wondered how they became friends as they didn't look to have had similar professions, but they bantered as though they knew each other very well. At my table, Rico was the only Hawaiian sitting among myself, Eli, and Carson. He mentioned the current wave conditions and how great the surfing has been lately. He didn't resemble the typical surfer dude I am familiar with but that lead me to believe that the salt water must soak into your blood if you are born here and most everyone must find a love in spending time with the ocean. With everyone seated and ready, we began the class.

Randy had to take one for the team on this one. He looked like that (or worse) in every. single. picture.

As the first day wound down, exactly at 3:00pm, Edmond puts down his jeweler's saw, mid pull, and walks over to the refrigerator. "Cocktail time!" he declares, and proceeds to mix a deep purple shaded Andre (sparkling wine popular with poor college students) with some red grape wine, who's label says exactly and only that, into an antique juice glass. While the rest of us finished up our projects, Ed snuck out of the room and returned a while later with a tray of beef teriyaki that he had just prepared on a brick grill in the yard. He told me that the teriyaki sauce was his wife's family recipe, and most everyone keeps their own recipe typically handed down for generations. Thoughts of my Granny's potato salad and my Aunt's biscuits jumped to my mind.

After everyone had enjoyed their beef satay, Ed shuffled back outside to cook more, each of us eventually trailing out to join him into the yard as we completed our respective projects. I don't think anyone besides Edmond was brave enough to partake in his special cocktail, but the rest of us grabbed a beer from the cooler resting by the smoking grill and took a seat at the picnic tables set up on Edmond's patio. Ed picked up his ukulele and began to play. Eventually his friends joined him in singing a few Hawaiian songs intermingling them with quick jokes and peels of laughter. I was told that impromptu get-togethers such as these are a regular occurrence in Hawaii, the music and feeling of which is often called Kanikapila.

After climbing 10,023 feet.

If you're wondering, as the afternoon turned to dinnertime, Nick accomplished his goal to ride to the top of Haleakala. When I first mentioned to Edmond that Nick wanted to go to the top, he suggested a shuttle that drove to the top and allowed participants coast back down. It took several efforts to get the correct intent across. "I get tired just thinking about driving up there in a car!" Keith proclaimed. While we were waiting to hear from Nick, Ed asked, "Have you heard the legend of Maui?" While there are many legends regarding a young boy named Maui and his exploits, Ed told me this one: Maui was the youngest of five children who lived on the island many many years ago. At that time, the people of Maui had trouble growing crops because the sun didn't stay long enough in the sky, causing the plants to wither and die, providing little food. Maui walked to the top of Haleakala and lassoed the sun. He pulled it closer to the land so the sun shone longer and brighter over the island, reaching all the way to the valley floors. The extra sunlight allowed for all the crops to grow in abundance and the people of Maui prospered.

That evening I asked Edmond about growing up on Maui, just a few miles down the road from where he now lives with this incredibly kind wife, Edwina. He told me how he spent his childhood a few miles down the road in the nearby town of Paia. His family was not wealthy, but, like my own family getting along in Appalachia, he didn't feel the effects as strongly as those in bigger cities. His mother would sew curtains and undershirts from empty rice sacks, the family ate what they grew or traded. The outdoors was Edmond's playground, his video game, his movie, his adventure. He would leave his house early in the morning and spend his day in the woods jumping into the eddies swirling in the mountain fed creeks that tumbled down the volcano's slopes, scavenging papayas, macadamia nuts, and citrus fruits for lunch, drinking water from the tributaries and playing with his friends until sundown. At 14, he got a job working on the nearest pineapple plantation. The work was arduous, requiring long hours of laboring under an unforgiving sun. The pineapple bushes were sharp, so in order to pull pineapples from the protective grasp of their spiny leaves, workers were given heavy denim sleeves to pin to their sweat drenched cotton t-shirts. I fell asleep that night thinking about my own family working in tobacco farms, playing corn cob baseball, wearing shirts made of left over grain sacks. They were worlds apart, but on a basic level, their upbringing was so similar.

The next morning Edmond and David took me and Nick to the local farmer's market. The produce was absolutely incredible-I did not recognize many of the fruits and vegetables being offered by vendors lining the street. At one booth selling breads and pastries, we chose a few turmeric and scallion filled scones for breakfast to accompany freshly squeezed orange juice and  picked up a couple of brightly colored Japanese noodle dishes from an eager Japanese couple. While they had an extremely limited English vocabulary, they were incredibly kind and seemed to be excited to share their traditional meals with us, explaining each of the ingredients in our two choices.

David is holding a lilikoi. It was not my favorite thing I've ever eaten.

The food in Hawaii is such an exciting mix of Asian and Spanish flavors. Later that day, when we broke for lunch, I noticed several of the guys placing various bowls and tupperware on the table. Keith brought his wife's family recipe of Portuguese soup, Rico brought Spam musubi (which, I learned on my last visit, is an amazingly delicious concoction of teriyaki glazed spam sandwiched between a layer of rice tightly wrapped in nori.) Given my typical diet of clean, fresh produce and maybe the occasional cut of local meat, you'd think that something as awful sounding as musubi would be the opposite of what I would willingly consume, but for some reason I cannot get enough of that stuff. I paid for it later though, because due to the sodium content in that Spam my lips were chapped for days.

Musubi. Might be my favorite thing I've ever eaten...

As we again gathered around the picnic tables on the patio having lunch, I asked some of the guys about their experiences growing up here. They each brought me a morsel of information and I ingested it all as eagerly as I did my Japanese noodles. Turns out Edmond's accent, though thicker than those I hear from most of the Hawaiian people I have encountered, is a product of speaking Pidgin. A pidgin is defined as a simplified, stripped down version of a language enabling several groups of people to communicate and create a somewhat common language. Historically, Hawaii was a leading contender for producing pineapples and sugar cane. Given the large number of immigrants arriving to the islands, the plantations set up camps for workers based on race. There were Japanese camps, Portuguese camps, Puerto Rican camps and Filipino. The Philippines and Japan are nearby neighbors (sort of), so having immigrants from those countries made sense but when I asked about people coming from Puerto Rico and Portugal, the answer was that they already had large sugar cane operations in place at the time, so many people were sent to Hawaii since they already knew the trade. Ed and Russell grew up on the same sugar plantation, Russell in the Japanese camp, "Camp 13" and Ed in the Portuguese. Most families kept to their respective camps, speaking their native language among each other and not mingling with other nationalities, but oftentimes food or music would bring them together. Everyone would bring bento boxes for lunch, the bottom filled with rice, and the top filled with the respective food of their ancestors. When the lunch break was announced, workers would sit together, spoon samples of each other's main dishes over their bowl of rice. "The kids didn't care, we all hung out together!" Ed said. That intermingling of children, music, and food is how pidgin English was born.

Learning from these guys was nothing short of extraordinary to me. While I was somewhat right upon first glance, Keith had worked as a high ranking police officer for many years, but also held a position in purchasing at the pineapple plantation for some time. I felt honored learning legends, music, and history from Ed, who served as a music teacher until his retirement, and can play pretty much any song imaginable on the ukulele. He even strummed and belted out Carolina in the Morning for me while Edmond held the afternoon cocktail hour.  Randy, while an electrician by trade, does incredibly intricate pin striping on old restored cars and motorcycles. I could see his artistry in his inlay work, but nothing could prepare me for the incredibly beautiful pen and ink drawings he does. My favorite one depicts women working in the pineapple factory, lined up stuffing pineapples into cans.

Pineapple Packers. 

Randy's uncle's truck was the first one on Lanai, the neighboring island where only native Hawaiians live.

As Nick and I headed off to explore the Big Island, I left filled with a deep appreciation for the folks who make these islands so special. I feel a little bit bad for charging them for a class to teach them my skill since, for free, they gave me so much more than I could ever give to them. Learning the stories of these past generations just getting by using the land, doing the best they could with what they had available, sharing their music and food with the next generations. Interesting that standing on the side of a volcano on a tropical island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean suddenly didn't seem so far from home.

Back woods Maui. Many houses don't have electricity here.

Edmond's aunt's house.

Island road. (Oprah's house is nearby. I bet she has electricity.)

Koa babies!!

Waterfall on the road to Hana

African Tulip on the road to Hana

Big Island landscape

Hike to the ocean.

Big Island hike near Pahoa, we saw no people but lots of sea turtles.

Volcanic rock

View from the Kapoho tidepools. Sunrise.

Drive up the west coast of the Big Island

My favorite hike: Pololu valley

Just a bit steep.