A Conversation with the Past

(The nature of this post springs from an old comment I posted back on an entry from The Last Embassy, titled “Conversations with the Past.” before I started blogging. Most of my conversations with the past involve some amount of self-loathing introspection.)

I’m doing some schoolwork… research while out on a Hawaiian cruise on New Year’s Eve. Such is the way of things with me. I do it because I need to, but I’m none too happy about spending precious vacation time this way. Out of the corner of my eye, I see someone I haven’t seen in a while. He had been sitting there, waiting for me to turn around and notice him, because he was too shy to talk. I turned to regard him… he seemed to be about eleven years old this time. I knew he wouldn’t be the first to say something, so I broke the ice.

“Hello, there.”

“Hi.”

“Happy New Year.”

*silence*

“What’s on your mind?”

“You’ve been feeling bad lately.”

*nod*

“Bad about still being me.”

I smile sadly, but say nothing. I don’t want to put it on his/our shoulders any more. I’ve been actively trying to get over it, and poor little mellow has done his share of crying.

“You have nice friends. They talk to you and make you feel better.”

“Yeah. They’re sweet, aren’t they…?”

At this point I notice a certain look in his eyes. Young m. mellow never smiled. At school, he was always too busy hiding, sulking, and nursing bruises to learn how to smile. But I remember that we always got a certain earnest look in our eyes when we were anticipating something good. The mouth didn’t know how to react, though the spirit certainly felt the intensity.

“You have a secret to share, don’t you? I can tell.”

*nod* “Yeah. Your friends are trying to make you feel better, and I want to try too. I’ll show you something.”

eleven mellow brings us back to art class, somewhere around the fifth or sixth grade. I always dreaded art class… I was never any good at it. I never did figure out how it came so easily to everyone else. My clumsy fingers could never sculpt anything that looked right. I couldn’t draw straight, sure lines, couldn’t figure out how to shade, couldn't draw proper perspective, and didn’t have an artistic imagination. I didn’t even have a sense of humor that the others could recognize. The paints, the pencils, the chalk, the clay – all of them were fascinating for their novelty, but I never figured out when and where all the other kids learned how to use them. I was asked to pick these things up and do something with them, time and time again, and I never knew how to use them. Art class was just like recess, and just like P.E. … I was always the runt who never had a handle on the game.

Today, it’s pastels. We were supposed to sketch a daytime tropical island vantage… a coconut tree growing from off the side of the frame, a sandy dune in the foreground giving way to a beach in the near distance, and beyond that, a deep blue ocean beneath an azure sky. Some of the other children had added a bright yellow sun high in the sky or beautiful renditions of clouds in gray and white. I was having an awful time. My tree looked cartoony, flat, and unreal. Downright ugly. I had never seen a real coconut tree; I only had the vaguest guess as to what one really looked like. I just knew that it looked like some kind of palm tree. I didn’t know where to draw bands of alternating dark and light, didn’t know the proportions, and my sky looked boringly blue, with no gradation of color, and I was scared, deathly scared of adding a sun because the way everything else was turning out, it would look bad too.

In a moment of desperate frustration, I grabbed the black pastel and started blacking out the tree, blacking out the sand, the dunes, everything. If it were all totally black, there would be no need for detail, no agonizing over shading and colors and depth, no challenge of the three-dimensional. Everyone else was almost done with theirs but I had little progress to show, and I hurriedly traced the black pastel across the paper until no hint of brown or green or beige showed through.

I grabbed the two darkest blue pastels and used them to wipe out the sky, wipe out the clouds, and turn the sea a deep midnight blue. With fifteen minutes to go, I nervously grabbed the unused orange, yellow, and red pastels from my box and started to work on adding the sun. I added the sun near the horizon, a great, warm, reddish-orange half-circle, already half-sunk into the sea. I traced the sun’s colors into the ocean, hoping that the effect would look as if the warm colors of the sunset were reflecting their last rays upon waves already settling into the night. The black tree, dune, and beach were not mistakes. They were cover-ups for my artistic ineptitude, but now they would also be the silhouettes left by the waning light of dusk. The art teacher walked by my table, and I froze in fright. It was wrong, all wrong. Everyone’s picture was of the daytime. Light blue skies, well-detailed coconut trees, bright blues… mine was sleepy and dark, and completely the wrong time of day. Theirs suggested warm breezes and the calling of sea birds. Mine suggested stillness, and the quiet rustling of palm trees at the end of the day. Theirs were awake and mine was asleep. I was in trouble again, I knew it.

“That’s good!”

I didn’t dare to look up any more than I dared to believe hearing it. Everyone knew I was bad at everything. Softball, volleyball, flag football, art, jokes, everything. I was bad at tetherball too, but I felt less bad about that, since we all know that tetherball’s just the dumbest damn game ever; the taller person always wins.

A few of the other kids came over to look at my sketch, and I shrank from the scrutiny, but much to my surprise everyone liked it because it was so different, because it really did manage to convey that sense of tropical paradise that we were all supposedly going after. I was so used to obsessing over the technical challenges of art that I had never really known that there was something more to it than trying so hard to draw properly. It was the one good day I had in art class.

“See? You’re no good at it, but you still did something right. They liked it, they all did. It was almost perfect, you know. They were all better at it than you, and then you went and did something crazy to try to fix it. And you didn’t even know how. You just got there somehow. You just did something nobody else thought of, that’s all.”

I’m still drinking in the memory, a little too stunned to answer forthwith, but I turn to eleven mellow and smile.

“We’re not perfect. We never will be. We’re too small, too weak, and too shy. But we’re not really that bad, you know?”

We look at each other. I can see the tears on my own face reflected in his.

“I thought of it because… well, we saw this picture last week, didn’t we? We’re in Hawaii now. We saw it for real. And with the way you’ve been feeling lately, I know you’ve been thinking a lot about me, and…”

I just turn around and grab eleven mellow in a big hug, which he returns in his own awkward and unsure way.

"Happy New Year."

“Happy New Year.”

No Horizon

It’s still sprinkling here off the coast of Maui. Our ship set sail late at night, several hours past sundown, and, as I have done on cruises before, I walked to one of the forward observation decks to watch what I could of our departure.

Hawaii’s population is fairly small compared to that of my home region. The lights speckling the shore looked cozily sparse compared to the crowded lights of the city, and they swung across and past my vision over the fifteen minutes it took for the ship to leave its moorings and settle into its course around the island. As the white and orange lights of the city swept from the field of vision, only a few points of light were left hovering here and there; the cloud cover meant that there were no stars or moon to light the waves, and all that could still be seen were the bright green beacons of the buoys marking the extremes of the harbor. Beyond that: waves and night.

Our ship’s not particularly big by present-day cruise ship standards, weighing in at something just under 48,000 tons, and as such, its motion is more subject to the movements of the sea than some of the other passengers might like. The rocking isn’t violent… for that, try cruising the Atlantic just east of the Caribbean… here in the Pacific it's gentle enough to be calming while still requiring you to be awake enough to maintain your own sense of balance while standing at the prow. I look over the forward railing as the last of the buoys passes quietly by the port side… the buoys were the last bright indicators of where heaven met earth or sea. Now I stare into near total darkness, with no real knowledge of where the horizon lies, or where it meets the darkness of the overcast sky. For a few minutes, all I can feel is the rolling of the ship and the wind blowing warmly into my face.

But after those few moments, my eyes adjust enough to let me see the waves. At least I think I see them… they loom out of the darkness in front of me, hundreds of feet in front and several stories below my vantage point. I sense them but I’m not really sure that I see them; they seem to take forms of darkness more solid than the rest of the unlit expanse. Maybe I’m guessing at their presence by the sounds of the sea, the low roar of the wind, and the otherworldly feeling of the ground moving beneath my feet. Maybe my mind is just filling in the blanks, conjuring inky swells within the sensory blind spot, too used to seeing order or too uncomfortable with the unknown to leave the space so visually empty.

Hints of great but gentle shapes against a black background. This is not the kind of darkness that engenders fear. Rather, I scan the night earnestly, trying to make out the waves, trying to get even the most illusory sense of the implied majesty. For a moment I forget myself, imagining that I can reach out across that great expanse and feel for the waves with my hands, or hover over the empty expanse like a lonely spirit searching for a long-lost home.

Why isn’t this scary? Why doesn’t the looming unknown make me afraid? Because this darkness is more like the mystery that lies behind hope. Not the ominous penumbra of some tenebrous predator. I can’t see where the unreachable sky meets the navigable horizon. I don’t know what’s possible and what’s not. It makes me want to try to reach out, to grasp for something that I hope is there, whether it’s just a trick of the imagination or a warm and gentle surge of tropical waters. Sometimes hope can be so much more bearable than the light of reality, where I wake up hoping to see a forested paradise teeming with water and sun situated off the railing, only to find a vast, empty expanse of overcast ocean with no inviting shores to be found in any direction.

In My Element

Actually, I probably couldn’t be more out of my element in such a beautiful place surrounded by nature. I’m very much a suburban boy. But standing in a waterfall is something I’ve always wanted to do. I mean, really – it’s like an orgy of rain, and you know how I am about rainfall. (When I go back and re-read some of my previous entries, it amazes me how preoccupied I seem to be with rainfall and its imagery.)

Our visit to Kauai was far too short. While my family went to play golf, I opted for a hike out to Princeville Ranch, a parcel of privately-owned land where the proprietors offer, amongst other things, hiking excursions through the rainforest-like terrain, through muddy gulches and groves of palms and walking trees too thick to see through. No wood I’ve ever walked through on the mainland ever looked so lively. All the gaudy mockups or scenic mimicry of jungle paradises in the themed vacation spots I’ve been to fall far short through no real fault of their own, for who could really duplicate something like this? You can recreate some of the look, but the moisture in the air and the rich but clean fragrance that permeates the air can’t quite be approximated. We hiked through winding trails too narrow to be called paths, through mud made of volcanic soil laden with water to the consistency of cake batter, over stones lit by rays of light threading their way through a canopy made of splaying palms, ferns and fruit trees.

The hike itself was supposed to be a difficult one by tourist standards, but it was barely enough to make a former resident of Berkeley’s Unit 4 Foothill break a sweat. My folks were off at the Kauai Marriott golf course, so I didn’t have to keep together with anyone in particular. I had a great time playing Wood Elf, standing easily on slippery terrain, walking lightly so as not to sink into the mud, and striding assuredly between the boulders and rocks rising from the currents of small rivers and streams. A constant exercise of poise and balance amongst lovely environs.

Of course, I suppose one of Tolkien’s wood elves would never have been bitten by so many mosquitoes. I react pretty badly to mosquito bites… no little bites for me, no sir. Every bite erupts into a huge swollen catastrophe, hard and red and anywhere from one to three inches across. One on my right forearm went so far as to hijack the entire range from wrist to elbow. I had a similar reaction to a mosquito bite a few years ago, which I showed to a classmate:

“Where is it? I don’t see it?”

“You’re looking too close. Stand back.”

“Whoa.”

I held up the forearm bite upon noticing it and showed it to my fellow hikers who had been complaining of bug bites of their own. Cue understated deadpan: “Well, here’s a pretty decent bug bite, no?” Astonished reactions ensued.

“Oh my god, are you allergic or something?”

“Not really, I just don’t get many bug bites back home, so I think my body’s just unused to them, that’s all. Oh, my virgin blood!”

“Does it itch?”

“Not as much as you’d think.”

*laughter* “Maybe it’ll itch more if we keep reminding him of it!”

“Well, the guide in Hilo did say that the locals tend to prefer Chinese food over the traditional fare…”

We reached the private waterfall after about two hours of hiking. The stream, clear and cold, poured down from fifty feet up to crash upon an array of smoothed rocks. Some of the older hikers waded right into the pool for a swim in waters that could only be described as brisk… we must have a few members of the Polar Bear Club in our group. Far too cold for me… I walked around the edge of the rockface to stand on the worn and pounded stones, letting the cold waters drench me from above. I looked out in front of me, a curtain of rushing water draped over the scenery like a passageway hung with strands of crystalline beads reflecting the sun. White mist lay suspended in the air, and the churning splash of the water dancing atop the rocks added a feeling of energy that mixed oddly with the cold. The trees framed pooling waters which fed another stream headed away from the falls, while ferns perched on the rock face unfurled their foliage in their ancient and curious manner. And over the roar of the water crashing down upon the rocks, I could hear the cheers and see the thumbs-ups offered by the other hikers for the guy crazy enough to stand straight and upright in a freezing waterfall.

What, Me Surf?

I stepped off the pier into Lahaina, Maui at about ten in the morning. Lahaina strikes me as something of a tourist trap, but hey – this occasion finds me a vacationing tourist in dire need of a break, and I’m more than willing to be captive here for a while. The day starts with a little shopping, a little bumbling amateur photography (I do hope something halfway tolerable comes out; I’ve been busy trying to burn the images of this place into my mind’s eye as a permanent memory). I took one picture of a shipwrecked sailboat perhaps four hundred feet off shore… the previous day, a guide pointed it out and said, “if you’re wondering what the deal is with that eyesore of an old boat, here’s the story: this past Halloween, a local went out on his boat, partied, got very drunk, and wrecked it in the shallows. He didn’t have the money to have it removed or dismantled, so he left it there… and the county of Maui has been fining him $5000 per day since then.” I wonder whose inertia is going to win out on this issue. Either way, it’s a bit of a shame to leave such an ugly wreck out in such a beautiful location.

I took lunch at the Cheeseburger in Paradise restaurant along Front Street. Not a bad cheeseburger, too – a tad pricey, at $7.95, but add a slice of roasted pineapple and a glass of cold guava juice, mix in the shorefront view and there you have it: a recipe for sigh-inducing happiness. A few hours to digest, and then it’s off to my first (and only) surfing lesson.

Surfing. A sport that, at least stereotypically, lends itself to two kinds of practitioners: vacuous stoners and slackers who really have nothing better to do with their lives, and bronzed, ripped, beautiful islanders who induce instant urges of infidelity in the hearts of vacationing spouses.

Neither of which includes me. I’m so far removed from either extreme that I feel decidedly uncomfortable with the idea of undertaking it myself – discomfort that’s only magnified by my squirming insecurity over my native klutziness and my academic paleness. I’m not fair-skinned amongst my usual crowd, but I feel conspicuously… uh, “albino” on this warm sunlit beach. I’m much relieved when the instructional staff hands us wetsuit tops to keep us from getting sunburnt. The sight of me with my shirt off isn’t anything that anyone, least of all me, wants to be seeing.

A few minutes (!) of instruction and friendly admonitions on land and then it’s off into the water we go. The water is a little chillier than I had expected here in bright, warm Maui, but things start out okay. Surfing’s at once slightly easier and slightly harder than you’d think. For instance, paddling on the surfboard isn’t as tiring as it seems; you actually move pretty well across the water without putting in as much effort as swimming. (Must be the board’s low drag coefficient – that, and you’re not trying to propel an awkwardly-shaped, wildly-thrashing, hilariously non-aerodynamic human body through the water) Even standing on the board and keeping your balance isn’t too taxing.

The hard part is the timing. In nine attempts, I managed to catch maybe three waves somewhat decently. Wiped out twice. The other four times, I took too long to stand up on the board, and by the time I managed it, the wave had passed beneath me completely, leaving me standing out in the middle of nice, calm water standing on top of a becalmed surfboard and looking like a complete idiot. Note to self: if you’re ever going to try this in the future, do your best to get up on that surfboard as soon as the wave reaches you; if you don’t start riding it, you don’t catch it.

Oh – and watch out for traffic. Getting rammed by another surfboarder is not fun. Took one in the left leg, and never did get a good look at whoever it was that steered that nine-foot-long torpedo-shaped raft directly into my left thigh. Ow. And not so much as a shouted apology. I need to give that guy a serious talking to. With my right foot.

There was also the matter of those dry heaves. The bobbing of my surfboard, combined with the bright tropical sun, had given me a headache and quite possibly my first real case of seasickness. My fellow computer science classmates and I used to joke about contracting vampirism through chronic sun deprivation, but this time the light sensitivity seemed very real, and I was squinting through almost the entire three-hour lesson. The taste of seawater really didn’t help either. It’s one thing to harbor philosophical, ideological, or metaphysical laments about an ivory tower existence; it’s another to be given physiological symptoms for it. Between the squinting, the salt, and the swaying of the surf, I developed a big headache, some queasiness, and then – about three times (or was it four?) – I had to throw up. Fortunately, they were just dry heaves – I know enough about exercise to know better than to eat directly before doing something strenuous, and I was very glad that I had given myself sufficient time to digest lunch before coming out here. Didn’t particularly want to be donating my Cheeseburger back into Paradise, not because it would have been embarrassing (which it certainly would have been), but moreso because of the thought that it would have been horribly sacrilegious to puke into Maui’s lovely waters. Tsk Tsk. For shame.

But all told, it was quite fun, and entertainment value aside, it was very worth it: I made myself go out and do this for the express purpose of doing something contrary to my habits and nature. Nothing ventured, nothing gained; if I don’t like who I am or the way that my life has been going, I pretty much have to change it myself, after all.

Hawaiian Trivia

Poi: A Hawaiian dish made of breadfruit or taro root, beaten to a thick paste and mixed with a few other ingredients that I can’t remember. It had a taste somewhat reminiscent of refried beans, slightly sweetened and flavored with dates. One of the guides said, “Actually, it’s wallpaper paste. We just like to tell tourists that it’s food, and then watch them try to eat it.” Another, more charitable description: “Eating poi by itself is kinda like eating straight mayo. It’s much better when you eat it with something else.” My dad’s pronouncement: “It’s revolting.”

The Sleeping Giant: A mountain formation on gorgeous, wild Kauai is said to have the profile of an immense Polynesian warrior lying on his back. Local mythology include several stories about the sleeping giant, one of which is that he was a mighty warrior who went to an especially good luau, ate far too much poi, fell asleep, and never got back up.

Humuhumunukunukuapua’a. Hawaii’s state fish. In English, we’d identify it as a species of Triggerfish. Hawaiians also called it the “sea pig” (because the profile of its head resembles that of a boar, though at least one person claimed that it was because the fish smelled like a pig, which I have a hard time believing, even as a gullible tourist), and it served as an acceptable substitute for land pigs in ceremonial sacrifices when regular pigs were scarce. Name’s fun to say. Take a shot and say it three times fast. Lather, Rinse, Repeat until you can’t take it anymore and snort your rum out the wrong pipe.

Fresh Water

Our ship stopped at Hilo, Hawaii, but not for very long… the ship moored at about ten this morning and set sail to leave at six. That was one of the things about this trip that bothered me the most, upon reading the itinerary – we wouldn’t have much time to explore much of anything. But it was a good day; the short trip inland brought us to Akaka Falls. We didn’t stay very long, but there are times when actual time matters little; the nature of waking consciousness makes the passage of time relative, and I’m glad that somehow or other, I managed to make the most of it.

It was overcast and raining slightly the whole day. Not surprising, given that we’d been told it rains for two-thirds of the year on the Big Island. Most of the passengers were somewhat disappointed, though if you know me well enough by now, you’d have guessed it didn’t bother me at all. The intermittent on-and-off drizzle came unaccompanied by fog or haze, leaving my sightseeing relatively unspoiled, and I smiled as the warm Hawaiian rain dappled my face while never quite soaking through my clothes.

Hawaii’s a green place, full of accidental beauty. Nothing at Akaka falls seemed out of place, the entire region looking as though some inspired but inebriated landscaper had haphazardly planted the most beautiful trees and flowers and left them to grow out of control. Back home, our golden hills, when viewed up close, are revealed to be vast expanses of dead weeds, full of burrs and thorns and crackling with the ominous latent potential of a massive fire hazard. But here in Hawaii, no glance anywhere revealed anything that one would have wished to remove. The banyan trees cast their roots downward towards the rich soil, creating a sort of one-tree jungle, hanging with moisture and inviting the imagination, branches and roots and limbs so numerous and confused that the brain has trouble processing it all. Huge red and purple flowers crane their way through moist ferns and between stalks of cane, each one a reflection of the regal but tropical beauty instantly suggestive of so many things Hawaiian.

The trail led to a vantage point looking across a great gorge to Akaka Falls, where the water of a small river takes a plunge four-hundred feet down a cliff face of black rock to land in the lagoon below. I’ve seen bigger, taller falls from a distance in Yosemite. And Akaka Falls is but a trickle compared to Niagara, of course… but these falls were rendered uncommonly lovely by the landscape and by the view. In nature, the grandiose and the unique each have a claim to beauty, and why not? The same is true of people; the stately and the flamboyant are attractive in obvious ways, while the demure and the unassuming may be equally lovely.

The waters that leapt from the top of the falls didn’t cascade downwards as a steady torrent of roaring vertical rapids, too thick to be seen through. The flow wasn’t quite generous enough to generate that particular kind of spectacle. Rather, the water flowed evenly from the top but quickly separated into nearly-distinct quantities of water whipped into white mist by the descent. It tumbled in layers over itself, sometimes reaching terminal velocity and sometimes not, buffeted by breeze and air resistance that caused parts of it to blow backwards against gravity. This created clouds of mist that billowed and drifted away from other, larger masses of water that continued the plunge to the lagoon. The splash of the falls entering the lagoon itself could be heard, gentle and distant, but was obscured by spreading clouds of mist that washed away from the entry point like insubstantial waves breaking upon the shore.

No expert in fluid mechanics, I stopped trying to think about the interplay of gravity and aerodynamics that made the sight of Akaka falls what it was. I watched a sheet of water take flight from the top of the falls, watched as it took the shape of a phoenix diving headfirst for the bottom in a revivifying death plunge worthy of the bird’s mythical destiny. The breeze and wind teased the phoenix’s wings outward from its body, rippling in flight, being consumed and created anew as the winds blasted them into hanging clouds of white fire and ephemeral sprays of silvery ash that evaporated instantly and erratically into the warm Hawaiian air. Even as the phoenix’s wings disappeared into the air, they unfurled over and over again, pulled and drawn from its body, flickering back into life, a miniature version of the phoenix’s own greater life cycle. Its descent was traced by a series of angular inscriptions carved naturally into the rock face, rectangular geometric patterns outlined by the splash and trickle of smaller waters that make their way down the rock face instead of leaping over it. These runes and the water gushing within were too distant to be seen in detail; rather, they seemed to shine as though intermittently illuminated by a silver searchlight in the rain, cryptically heralding the phoenix’s mighty passage. As a symbol of rebirth, it wreaked no devastation in its wake; the black rocks of the falls were covered in greenery, and all the surroundings were green and full of life. This phoenix brings life, not death… a symbol of the power to nurture and create, of sustaining sacrifices instead of fire and destruction. I begin to wonder if the true phoenix is indeed a creature of water, not fire – a mirage born of the burning sands of the desert, made real by some natural miracle.

It disappears into the roiling clouds of billowing vapor below and is no more. Transformed into a cool, comforting mist of fresh water, it hangs in the air, looking comforting, cool, and reinvigorating. I’m wishing I could go down to the lagoon and wade through those waters. I look upwards, back to the top of the falls, where the phoenix is reborn, one amongst many, gathering speed for another great dive past the runes of the rockface.

We only stayed at the falls for about ten minutes. It seemed so much longer. Thank goodness for that.