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.