Harry Whitney's coming to Ka'u

Harry Whitney is a fantastic teacher of horses and humans. I've had a lot of teachers of all sorts of methodologies and temperaments and Harry is quite possibly the best, and definitely in the top two. He is a very subtle and sweet person.

I just saw the movie "I Heart Huckabees" last night. Harry is a little bit of an existential detective. The horses help with the existential part. The thing about horses is that they don't care much about all of the stuff whirling around in a human's head. And yet you have to create a relationship with a horse if you are going to be a competant horse person. So you have to build a relationship that is non-verbal, non-symbolic. It is not structured by the cultural apparatus that usually structures relationships between humans. This can be quite challenging, especially with a creature that is 6-10 times one's size and their own hard-wired view on what is important in the world.

Horses understand the world on gut level, in a very simple but also very honest way. For instance horses do not care one iota about money. This is very important to most humans, structures our relationships with each other a great deal of the time. Horses don't care about money but they care about the relationships which money sometimes represents, and that is leadership. Horses always want to know who is in charge, who is going to be responsible for the situation. If they feel that their rider is not on top of things, then they are going to fill in. Which is the reasonable thing to do. The heart of some of the more traditional approaches to horsemanship (and leadership) is to break that idea of taking over right out of a horse (or human). In very blunt and sometime brutal ways a horse is shown that it has no power any more, even over it's own life. This simplifies the relationship between human and horses quite a bit. But it certainly is not very pretty. But it works. And sometimes it's a better deal for all involved to have things real clear like that. But of course it pretty much kills all the joy out of all involved.

There are other options, but their a lot more difficult. That's where Harry and people like him come in.

So I'm back. The winter months are more conducive to "civilized," indoor activities, what with the encroaching darkness and all. So here's the grass in our pasture. It's been a good year, as far as grass goes, despite the vog. Some plants really don't seem to be affected. Others just up and die. The eucalyptus plantings seem to be fairly sensitive. One particular species that was planted on the edge of a coffee farm in Moa'ula succumbed instantly. Also the extremely noxious (but quite pretty) Madagascar fireweed seems to be sensitive. It's been a year of living with vog. The last time I wrote for this blog, the problem didn't even exist yet. It kind of crept up on us. Officially it started in March, but it wasn't until late April that it became clear that it was going to be a Problem. There was a week in late April when we all walked around with ash falling on us all day long. Some of the children had respiratory problems and they all had blood-shot eyes. I couldn't wear my contacts for a couple of weeks. We wondered if it would get worse, and what life would be like if Ka'u became uninhabitable. It's one thing to choose to leave your home, another to be forced to leave.

It's a strange thought to have to entertain seriously- the thought of being forced to leave your home behind. One is usually so caught up in the mechanics of maintaining, creating, or fixing the world that you live in, that you don't hardly realize how absurdly beautiful it is, how it is a great work of art; like a piece of music that one just keeps working on, whether it is symphonic or a simple melody. Just the thought of being an exile puts a completely different perspective on what it that we live and do, and the totality that we make out of the living in doing. Most of the time we're far too immersed in it all, in keeping the music playing, to enjoy what we've made.

But so far the vog is really just a nuisance rather than an apocalypse.

Pickle mango

Pickle mango is so popular you can use it like money.

In late summer everyone with access to a mango tree goes into business. There are pickle mango sellers along the roads, going from door to door, from the back of trucks, at the beach, the rodeo, the baseball game, outside the supermarkets.

Pickle mango is made from green mangoes. crunchy and tart. The little, prolific "common" mango variety is preferred for this, not the elite varieties such as Haden and Pirrie. Common mangos have fine textured flesh and are extra-lemony, like Granny Smith apples. The green mangoes are peeled and the flesh cut off of the seeds. The mango-slices are then soaked for a day or two in a mixture of vinegar, sugar, water, and li-hing mui spice.


Pickle mango is versatile, you can eat it anytime, as a snack, as an appetizer, as a fruit, as a vegetable, as a condiment, as dessert. Locals eat ripe mangoes occasionally, reservedly, almost with disdain, but pickle mango is craved, coveted, eaten by the pound.


For years, between the age of 3 and 6, pickle mango was the only vegetable substance, aside from white rice, that my nephew would willingly eat.


Pickle mango has a great deal of nostalgia appeal. It reminds everyone who has grown up in Hawaii of childhood, in which at some point or another one climbed into the hospitable arms of a mango tree with their turpentine-scented sap, and crackly red-veined leaves and picked a mango, green or ripe. That is, one was initiated into the tribe of mango-lovers.

Waikapuna

Almost all cultures have stories of places that exist in a different realm: Shangri-la, Peach Blossom Spring, the land behind the waterfall's veil. Waikapuna is such a place.

Most of the landfall of Ka'u meets the ocean with black lava cliffs against which the waves pound mightily, sending up white explosions of sea-spray. Waikapuna is one of the rare spots where the sea and the land meet on the same level, in a bay of the ocean and a cradle of the land. Directly behind the beach is a ring of hills that block off almost all indication of the rest of the world. All that matters when you are at Waikapuna is the sound of the ocean, the feel of the sun and the wind on one's skin, the warmth of the sand, the cool of the water. It is a place both elemental and unusually gentle for this rocky coast.

It is a quiet place, but rich. There are rock tidepools and inlets full of creatures, and there is a sheltered, sandy pool which fills and empties as the tide changes. There is a beautiful miniature bay into which perfectly formed waves break continually. On the sea-cliffs there are little pools full of fluer-de-sel salt crystals which glitter in the sunlight and taste like the essence of ocean. One of my favorite things about Waikapuna are the heliotrope trees. There are heliotrope trees elsewhere, but these trees seem to have personalities that shelter and welcome one to the place. In the night their beautiful branches seem like a net woven with stars, and in the daytime the sunlight glances through their leaves and bees drone amongst their flowers.

Waikapuna (lit. water (of) the springs) was much loved in ancient times for its three pools of spring water. The topmost pool was pure fresh water and was used for drinking. The middle pool was somwhat brackish and used for bathing, and the third pool even more mixed with salt water and used for washing. In the late 1800's an earthquake destroyed the spring and the pools and there is only one of the pools left in a cleft of rock deep in underbrush, and it is very brackish. The ruins and remains of many house-sites surround the beach.

And it is much loved today, though no one lives there anymore. Returning from a visit there, one feels that one has been somewhere far away.

Nice pig, dat (2)

I was with a 91-year old man, who has lived in Ka'u his whole life. He still farms coffee on his homestead surrounded by macadamia orchards. He astounded everyone when he ran off to get us a jabong to try. Someone asked him, "What do you eat everyday, that you are so fit at your age?" He said, "I drink five, six cups of coffee every day. I have toast for breakfast and fruit. I eat bento for lunch. I used to go up in the mountains every weekend hunt pig. I would still go but I too deaf already. No can hear the dog bark. I used to make kalua pig, lau-lau, smoke meat, sausage. Those pigs, they only eat natural stuffs, no chemicals! All the food you buy these days, all full of chemicals. No good."



His son was gored by a pig just this last year.



Wild pig meat is an interesting substance to work with as a cook. It tastes like forests, is resilient to the tooth, and it's impossible to get it to brown. It just goes from raw to rubbery. In other words you can't just fry up some pork chops. Oh no! You have to be clever and resourceful. You have to overcome the pig yet another time, as it were, in order to get something good to eat.



The most popular strategy is to cut the wild pork into thin strips, soak the strips in a strong marinade, and then smoke them in your handy smoke-house, constructed just to deal with the problem of having wild pig meat to eat. Fried up, wild pig smoke meat is dense with flavors - redolent of ginger, soy sauce, sugar, garlic with just a hint of wild fern shoot in the background. It is the star of any pupu table, the visible proof of a man's he-man-ness, and the gift of the forest to this all-too-civilized world.

Glossary

jabong - pomelo (Filipino)

bento - packed lunch, for eating in the field (Japanese)

kalua - pit oven-cooked (Hawaiian)

lau-lau - literally "leaf-leaf", seasoned meats & fish wrapped in two kinds of leaves & kalua-d (Hawaiian)

pupu - tapas (Hawaiian)

Nice pig, dat!

Pig hunting is very big here.


Actually it's the true, living religion of Ka'u. That's where you'll find most of the men on a Sunday morning. They'll be up before dawn, heading into the hills with a pack full of exuberant dogs in the bed of their pickup. And they'll go at it fervently as long as there are pigs to be found.


To say that Ka'u is rural is somewhat wishful. The local culture, despite decades of plantation agriculture, never has given up its allegiance to the wild ways of the hunter's life. "Bucolic" is not something you think of when you think of Ka'u. It's entirely too disorderly and precarious a place.



Pig hunting is very important. It keeps the men in the forest, out of the house, and out of trouble. It's a wonderful reason to keep a lot of dogs and what is life without dogs? It gives the men and the dogs something to do together, so that there will be mutual admiration amongst them. And it keeps the pigs, who are wonderful creature and just as smart as men and dogs, from taking over the world.



It's a dangerous sport, mostly for the dogs. A boar's tusks can rip a dog's throat open in an instant. This happened a lot before the hunters started using cut-collars, thick nylon collars that cover a dog's entire neck. But the dogs still get very serious injuries. The men take an ill-concealed pride in the scars of their dogs. Each scar on a beloved hunting dog is a story much recounted and embellished, with the dogs as stars, the pig as co-star, and the hunter as arbiter of good and evil, and always, eventually, the victor.



In Ka'u pig hunting tournaments a big deal: the teams  are given 24 hours to pound the forests in search of prize pigs - the biggest pig wins the overall prize but there are prizes for sub-categories such as: the biggest boar, the biggest sow, and the boar with the longest tusks. The winners are instant celebrities of the pig-hunting world, especially the winner of the highly esteemed "Jungle Express" hunting tournament. Hunters come from all over the island on the day of the big tournament, and after staying up all night searching the forests, the contestants meet early in the morning at a beach park for the weighing and measuring. The winners are photographed with their prize, their team-mates, and their kids. It's a proud moment.