How many walks fit on the head of a pin?

 

"How am I going to pull all of this together?" I asked Rachelle, on a day of many Lilith walks at once. "You'll think of something."

 

She and Aldon (who runs the Waikane Store on Kam Highway with his mother) had caught up with us at the front gate, said they were going to join us on our walk. Aldon did a fist bump with Uncle J's brother at the shack; said he missed their father, a prominent preacher. Aldon did lots of fist bumps on our walk; he knew Ola's grandpa, the bus driver. We all knew Paul the mortician, who suggested that I go to their meeting this evening (they're all Jehovah's Witnesses) to find out about the prophecy (change of leadership is coming, not meaning just Trump, but even perhaps human leadership). He muttered about the backstories to S and J getting fired, but would say no more. 

 

As we walked up hill, Aldon talked about languages (he's learning Hebrew), including the politics of pronunciation, quoted a Biblical verse, recommended movies, marveled at Lilith's high energy. Said he loves the Bible, detective stories and gangsters. He and R lamented the spate of accidents on Kam Highway the past few days. Attempted murder last night at the Hygienic Store. Their mental health outreach, the strange things people yell at them when they're handing out JW materials. "One guy yelled BLACK SUNDAY in my ear," Aldon said. "What's that mean?" He didn't have a clue. He tries not to argue back.

Post-termination walk in the cemetery

"I gather things have changed," I said to R at the guard shack this morning. He laughed awkwardly. The shack is being renovated; apparently they're going to add a walk-in closet. "For skeletons?" I asked. New windows, raw 2x4's, another guy seated on an office chair in the middle of it all. Up the hill, I approached Uncle J's brother, still seated in a chair beside the temple parking lot, the better to move cones when large buses pull up. He's a man of few words.. "It's not us," he said. "It's management. And look at this zoo." 

 

I gave Hoku the aloha shirt I'd promised him. He sports "formal wear" on Fridays (it's a work tradition), even as he spends hours weed whacking. I congratulated them on still having jobs. Lilith leapt toward Ola for her attention, then back to Hoku. Well, there were stories. S had overlooked some thefts by three guys (also left go). And Uncle J had been caught on camera giving flowers away. I chalked some of this up to anger at management. 

 

"Such a sweet crime," a friend says on the phone, "taking flowers."

 

from Startles

Stories are grim, but moments burst out like peonies. On Elepaio, a sign reads: “Private Sign / Do Not Read / $500 Fine.” I like the anonymous wit and the threat to me, who can’t be seen by the sign maker. In a framed, cracked mirror, I see my own torso reflected through the encroaching forest, take a selfie, which requires my face, my cap, my camera. I shoot a private photo of the private sign, and post it.

The joke’s on me, but who told it? That’s the funny part. I try to tell the canoe builder a “funny story,” but he asks me if I have any. I tell him one, but it’s not funny. I wonder how he knows about my stories. We’ve exchanged paranoia.

The tall husky mix who walked miles with me ran around the ranger’s cabin after a pheasant and brought it back in her mouth. Veered sharply, trotted back the way we’d come. How we choose other souls to accompany us; how we ourselves are chosen, is a mystery. She wore a collar, so someone had chosen her.

The story was framed by two episodes of forgetting, the first a face and the second a name. Both people recognized me, in a recognition scene that went only one way, or bent before it arrived, like a driveway in the forest. That way, you can’t see the house at the end of the road. It’s built-in privacy, and you can get fined for trespassing. I make the mistake of not asking, again.

Where we once belonged is no longer where you are, my friend. Two years ago you were still alive, looking forward to your granddaughter’s visit, a house on your land, a poetry workshop. You’d told me years before that you were no longer afraid to die. Were you still afraid of the violence, of not being found soon enough to tell the broken story of your death? Does death become you now, like a prayer scarf?

It’s the one way nature of the sign that makes me laugh. Someone has invited me into a conversation I can’t sustain, like talking to the dead. A grant writer invents new words for now forbidden ones: woman is now person; equity is now assumed. Because racism doesn’t exist, we indulge it more. We call it fairness.

Just when you think you belong, you trip hard on the rock of being seen as stranger. To be, long. A temporal measurement, as if duration were the only key. Sympathy sometimes leads to bad writing. Those who try too hard are both admirable and foolish.

 

On forgetting

 

Turns out I had met Bobby at the Ranger's cabin, that he was the man who makes canoes, and that he'd seen my photograph of one of his projects. 

 

When I got to the turn on Elepaio Road, off Haunani, I saw a dog in the distance staring at me. I stopped. She approached slowly, stopped again. She was a husky mix, tall and thin, with salmon collar and a sweet temperament. When I continued my walk, she came with me. I'd stop for photos, she'd veer off to flush pheasants, and once, two pigs. We walked to the end of the road, past the tall pines, and turned around. We walked and walked together, though she paused often to mark territory or to sniff. She came down Haunani with me, turned right on Maile. We got as far as the ranger's cabin. I wanted to ask Bobby about the dog, but he was gone. 

 

A sudden WHOOSH and the dog sprinted after a pheasant. They ran behind the cabin, pheasant screaming, until I saw, through the space between garage and cabin, that the dog had the pheasant in her mouth. She came running back. Not a gift I want, I thought. But as she came toward me, she veered suddenly and ran back toward Haunani, pheasant lodged firmly in her mouth. A chicken clucked next to the garage.

 

"Where's your dog?" asked a woman I ran into shortly after. When I said "Lilith," she remembered. She remembered my name, too. I told her that I don't recall names well any more, and she described the process by which she locks names into her head, but also told me about the time--horrified--she forgot a good friend's name. She's seen the light, collared, beautiful dog around. The dog walks the perimeter of her property near Elepaio. "Some dogs just wander," she said, lamenting that a lot of people now call animal control.

 

"I'm Michelle," she said. I tried the brain lock trick, but locks increasingly seem meant to be picked. 

 

--Volcano 

Another termination

My last few conversations with S in the cemetery were largely about Uncle J,, who has been terribly depressed lately. Word had it that he'd quit his other job and was doing extra hours at the cemetery. I delivered an envelope to Uncle J a couple of weeks ago; in it was material from the Mayo Clinic about depression. I wrote a note to him from Lilith and me and added that "S cares about you." Today, S--who was "terminated" a week ago-- texted me to say that J had been fired.

 

Lilith and I have been interacting with S and J for ten years now, through COVID (they denied it) and Trump (they loved him) and Biden (he was demented) and Harris (she was dumb). We hardly agreed on anything, except that we loved Lilith and were oddly fond of one another. More recently, the cemetery politics had gotten very nasty, and I talked to them about that, as about mortality and friendship. You can't help but feel deeply in such a place. 

 

I worry about them, S and J. I grieve for that community (another employee had quit recently under the stress of surveillance and problems with the boss). And, since writers are always problematic in this way, I feel the probable loss of my 10 year project, Lilith Walks. In our own ways, Lilith and I will have been "terminated" by the vulture capitalists and their henchmen. I will not lose my livelihood, but my stories, my threads, my documentation, part of my vocation have been taken from me.

 

When I get back to O`ahu, I'll seek out Lilith's and my remaining friends, and see what they make of all the unmaking going on around them. Cut trees, cut people, cut cords.

 

Two disasters

 

1.

 

I'd been sitting on a rock wall for hours at the Jaggar lookout, staring at Kilauea burping lava but not yet erupting, when I saw a man standing behind me wearing a Gauley River teeshirt from West Virginia. "Wasn't there a mining disaster near there in the 30's," I asked him. A woman who may have been his daughter said, "yes, Hawk's Nest Tunnel." I told him about _The Book of the Dead_, by Muriel Rukeyser. I remembered that lots of miners died of silicosis; the corporation hadn't sprayed water on the rock before the miners drilled into it. That the corporation brought in African Americans from the south to work during a strike and they also died of silicosis. 

 

His father was a coal miner; had been trapped in a mine for days once. Dangerous work. They just lost two miners near them recently. He'd wanted to be a history professor, but didn't finish school after his daughter came along. His wife was a teacher, then a principal. He noticed when he worked at her school that he was smarter than the teachers. They were good at what they did, but one woman left her keys in her car every morning, and he had to retrieve them for her. No common sense, he said. 

 

2.

 

Seated beside me, after the couple from Texas left because their time on-island was running short, was a gray stubble-chinned white man with an accent that had nothing to do with Hawai`i. Did I hear him mention Arkansas? Lives in Pahoa, loves Ledward Kaapana's music, but wasn't at the concert the other night. He'd lost his house in 2018. "It was like a big party on the road down there," he said, "every night, because no one thought their house was getting destroyed." He'd stayed in his house until the last moment because other places had been ransacked while their owners weren't allowed in. One guy had a house up a hill, and he was in there when the lava started pushing against the walls. Horror movie. Yes, he'd seen the destruction of camera V3 by Kilauea a couple of months ago, as the tephra got closer and closer and the lens finally broke. It had taken a long time to get things straight after his house was destroyed.

 

"So the volcano destroyed your house and you're up here watching Pele now?" "Yes, I prefer to watch up here."

 

Someone asked if he'd leave Hawai`i. No, he likes it here. There's nowhere he'd rather be.

On "termination"

My cemetery buddy, Scott (he of all conspiracy theories, meditations on mortality, lover of trees, who cared about walkers like me, and asked after us when we disappeared, who visited his late wife's grave most days, who spoke his mind to the bosses), just texted me to say that he'd been "terminated" by Valley of the Temples cemetery. Lilith and I will miss him. 

 

God damn the vulture capitalists.

 

On chickens

He waved from his truck going by as I took a photo of yet another stump (HELCO had taken down a lot of trees next to power lines during the month of storms). The wood was nearly saffron, a flag pole of splinters sticking up from a rough table. As I got to where he'd turned in at the old ranger cabin, he greeted me. "You've got chickens," I noted, as a hen and several chicks walked in front of me. 

 

I told him that when I lived in Charlottesville, Virginia there was one rooster in town that caused quite a kerfuffle. No one wanted it around. "Should have killed it," he said. He'd grown up in Arlington. Half-Hawaiian, half-Minnesotan, dad in the military. 

 

Of these chickens, he said, "they're moa--m o a--he carefully spelled it out for me. The chickens brought by early Polynesians. They're great for this place; they eat mosquitos and centipedes. Strangely, you can hunt them all the time. There are seasons for pheasants, even doves (they were brought in to hunt), but the moa have no season." He said he'd killed some of them. "Do they taste good?" "No, I get them for my friends who work with feathers."

 

"I'm Bobby," he said. "Nice to meet you," I responded. As he walked toward the garage (where I had once taken pictures of a canoe) and I up the hill, I wondered if we hadn't met before.

 

Volcano, sans Lilith, though I did show off her photo

 

"You're taking pictures of houses," he asked, or stated gently. He was Dennis, and beside him was Miss Teresa; with them both was a pale colored pit bull with amazing light eyes. I said I take pictures of everything and turned on my instagram to show them. As usual, nothing relevant showed, so I put down the phone. I said I'd been to Led Kaapana's concert last night. "My wife's related to him," Dennis said, "Ledward and Nedward and the rest of them." I told them I'd seen an `io on the power line above us, once stared at it for a long time as it looked back at me. He said he's seen pueo on this street, so doubting my classification, I suggested that perhaps I'd seen a pueo. "Hard to tell the difference sometimes," he said, "though it's easy to spot a barn owl."

 

I took the dog's picture, and then theirs. They're neighbors on this street, and he lives across from the sheep (goat) down the road. "Do you have an old truck with bones on the top?" I asked. "Yes, the bones were for my grandson, who loved dinosaurs; he played with them a lot. The hip bones looked like eyes, so he put them next to each other. I hope he remembers those days; he's a teenager now." The truck really has to go, he opined, though it had got him to work back in the day.

 

I thanked him for the truck, said I'd taken lots of photographs of it over the years. "It's a wonderful truck." Some other neighbors drove up, and I kept walking, stopping at the goat and the truck to take pictures. He said I should drop by any time.

Photo spread from Italy, with prose

 Pina Piccolo has kindly published a sheaf of my photos in The Dreaming Machine, along with other photos sprinkled throughout the issue. 

Take a close look at the entire journal. https://www.thedreamingmachine.com/ 

 

Disappearances

"S told me that people become attached to the trees next to family member's graves," I said to a woman who was standing next to a stump, looking confused. She hadn't visited in a while. I pointed to another stump nearby. "There's a man who comes to that grave--lots of tatts--I haven't seen him in a while." She said they'd picked the grave site because of the tree. And now, she noted, it's all about money. The late trees had stood in the line of sight between the upper road and the new water feature, its bright gold arrow and sign, "OCEAN VIEW." Two of my favorite trees died for that sign.

 

Jo, who sits at the front of the administrative building, had no idea what happened to S; she's also been texting him. No response. She spoke quite softly. "Gotta watch what you say now; there are cameras everywhere." Smiled, said she was lucky because her camera had no audio.

 

In the conspiracy theorist's absence

Today, three cats lay down in the unmarked spot where S had always parked his beaten up green van. He had names for them.

Design of darkness (to appall)

 

"You're here on a Monday," I said to Uncle J, who was alone at the guard shack. S was not there, hadn't been for days. J was there because someone had to be. I asked if he'd been laid off. J didn't know. "He said that in a year no one who works here now would still be there," I said, "but he said that to me just last week."

Up the hill, Hoku and Ola said that S had been put on administrative leave. They didn't know what that meant, exactly. He and the boss didn't get along, they said. Lilith accepted their attention with benevolence.

 

On our way out, I said "administrative leave," to Uncle J. "Oh no, he's gone. He took all of his stuff with him. Won't answer my calls, and if he doesn't answer mine, he won't answer anyone's." I told Uncle J to take care of himself. Neither of us mentioned the fat envelope I'd passed him recently with Mayo Clinic information about depression and treatment. "S cares about you," I added.

 

I told him about our cat that went from not eating to eating everything in sight. "I guess I'd better start eating again," he said, vape smoke wrapping around his now thin face. "This was all done by design," he added.

Territorial imperatives

1.

 

A young bearded man was standing behind the receptionist Jo at the entrance to the main building at Valley of the Temples. I thought he wanted to say something to her. No. He smiled, looked off toward the mountains. "Men stand behind me," she said with a grin. She lives with men; she likes that. The men are young, eye candy; doesn't hurt, you know. Has arthritis in her knees, her neck, her hands, can't open cans or much else. Men leave you alone. She used to live with women, but it didn't work. "Territory, you know." "Don't take this wrong," she said, looking in my eyes. "But the one woman was a retired professor. She said to tell her whenever something was wrong. But she wouldn't listen. She could talk, though." And then there was the woman with three master's degrees. Also impossible to live with.

 

"I'll keep my degrees to myself, then," I told her. "Oh, we can talk just fine," she said, "but we couldn't live together."

 

 

2.

 

"I'm SO tired," a woman said to the mortician, who was standing near the entrance. "I've worked 9-9 three days in a row." "Why you do that?" he asked. "Because I have three jobs," she said.

 

The mortician said he was exhausted. Always at work. Why? I ask. He answers the phone when it rings; spent too many years in emergency management not to. "It's not an emergency any more when they're dead, is it?" I asked. "Oh yes it is . . . there's a family to deal with."