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.