Tomorrow

I'm going up into the mountains to beg the gods for water.

OK, I'm going to go up in a Toyota Tacoma with a bunch of guys to map out a waterline from a spring deep in the mountains, and the actual gods that I have to appease are a bunch of bureaucrats in Honolulu, but still it's going to be a primal day of slithering around in the mud and the ferns literally searching for the source of all goodness and life: fresh water.

I've been up to this spring perhaps a half a dozen times in the last 15 years. Although it's marked on any number of maps, it is still a little tricky actually finding the living, bubbling thing in all that forest. We want to bring a little of the water down to help the ranchers of the area survive this El Nino winter, but the spring is located in a conservation district and the layers of bureaucratic permitting that shield it from even the most innocent use are forbidding, to say the least.

Actually it's not really a spring either, as it was created in the twenties and thirties by the sugar plantations. Work crews dug a horizontal shaft into the mountains at the meeting point of a porous layer of lava stone and an impervious layer of volcanic ash. Where the water filtering through the rock met the thick ash, fresh water would flow sideways creating a potential water source.

One of the unforgettable moments of my life was the day we hiked up into the mountains, past the known spring in search of a half-remembered one, into a deeper wilderness of moss-thick ravines shaded by hapu'u ferns and came upon, in all that brown and green, a straggly red rose-bush with a single bloom struggling for light where some long-dead tunnel diggers had planted it near their camp as they searched the mountain's layers of rock and ash for the hidden streams of water.

Kuahiwis in the city

Here's the link to the wonderful article that Wanda Adams of the Honolulu Advertiser did about a beef tasting that Alan Wong put together. Dan Nakasone likes to stay under the radar but he has been doing so much for local agriculture, and much of it out of absolute aloha, that he really deserves a medal of honor from all of us in farmers and ranchers for making it happen. And Alan Wong has brought along so many farmers, putting up with our beginner's mistakes and learning curves as we figure out product, processing, packaging, distribution - and how to act in the big city. He and his crew make everyone they come into contact with feel like they are the President of the United States. Big Mahalo, Alan, Dan, Wanda!

Beef, au naturel honoluluadvertiser.com The Honolulu Advertiser