What I thought was short-cut proved to be a bog

 

16 April 2022

What I’d thought was a short-cut proved to be a bog. Sunken nearly to my knees, I looked to my right and saw the large pipe, the bridge, evidence of an occasional stream. My sandals sit by the door, hosed down, still smelling of Hau`ula peat. I walked barefoot--except for the mud--to one of three memorials on the beach: three for two men. A name in the tree, “Ku.” A banner, flags. More likely, there three for one man, Braddah Ku, shown twice, younger and older, on one banner. I find him on-line. He was 48.

At another beach park I find a tree decorated with water floats; underneath is a red chair, looking out to sea. In the tree’s crook, faded photos of a woman and a boy. Under the tree, on the ocean side, sit empty wine bottles and a small pair of red tennis shoes. This was not a drowning but a car crash.

Bryant says his friend is depressed; they talk nearly every day now. His daughter leaves for college soon, and his parents are old, a thousand miles away. Last night they talked about tanks getting killed in the Ukraine. How when a tank gets hit, it’s repaired. A crew goes in to clean out the dead’s pieces, to make the tank seem new, except there are always stains in the cracks. Like hotel staff, they clear the armored room for another set of occupants, precarious in their hutches. Everyone knows it. “When I died, they washed me out of the turret with a hose." I send the link. For god’s sake, talk next about flowers.

The need to know, to understand these waves of political and military history, set against the need to stay above water, to not drown. To make memorials inside our conversations, as we look at the white-topped waves of a large blue ocean. To confront the axis of linear and circular time, without leaping into its saw. See saw see saw. Saw sea.

On-line, I find a photograph of the car’s wreckage, a story about the mother and her son and two visitors from Utah who survived their end of the accident. I find a photograph of the young woman who died at Crouching Lion, a video of her grieving friend. My research is my remembrance, made whole-cloth of others’ words and pictures, a memorial of a memorial. What good does this do to me or to anyone? Not evidence of war crimes, or memories cherished for the families; not altars made to poetry, or even prose. Could I not simply drive past?

I drove back home, feet and trousers black with mud, sandals in the trunk of the car. The trip smelled of mud. In the photograph, my foot appears sculpted, toe nails outlined in mud, the bluish straps mere suggestions. It’s the smell of earth, of death becoming life, of sweet water so close to the salt ocean. “Is that Hawaiian mud?” a cousin asks. The `aina, rich with stink, my toenails still black with it. Clean and unclean memory. The flowers, the ones that had not faded, were bright. For “Papa,” a red lei and yellow sunflowers, hanging from a palm.