Secrets of the Mountains & Oddities of the Farmer's Market

This Dr. Seussish-looking plant is a rare native called opelu, like the fish. It was growing in the ravine that we hiked through in the forest (nearly a month ago now, it's scary that the months flash by like days). It is called opelu because the underside of the leaves have a silvery irridescence like the fish flashing in the water. It is the mauka incarnation of the makai fish body, in the Hawaiian poetry of names and things.

Last week I turned up at the Na'alehu farmer's market and there on my neighbors table (she sells jewelry) were four Buddha's hands, a variety of citron celebrated in Chinese culture for its fragrance. What are the odds of that? Supposedly there are only two trees on the island, and those four hands are the entire crop this year for one of those trees. I bought two. My friend Lorie Obra, the coffee grower, kept asking me "What do you do with it?" Lorie is Filipino and I'm half-Filipino, and that is the quintessential Filipino question. We are very pragmatic. My explanations about the Chinese aesthetic of qikuai or strangeness, was not satisfactory to her. So after appreciated the weirdness of my Buddha's hands for a few days, I chopped up the less weird one into little bits and candied it. Very yummy. I'll take it to the farmer's market today to reassure Lorie that I have not betrayed my Filipino values.

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

Wild Read by a Wild Woman

The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith

Ex-vegan radical feminist anti-pornographer born-again farmer from the city etc. My boyfriend is getting sick of me referring to him as "the patriach" but that's just my geeky sense of humor. Lierre Keith has done a lot of very interesting research, which she turns to very provocative use. She calls veganism "part cult, part eating disorder." You go, girl!

Hard but Good

One of the books that I have been dipping into is James Herriot's "All Things Wise and Wonderful." It's another 25 cent book. Definitely not the latest thing. Herriot relates his experiences as veterinarian - pre-penicillin! - in the English countryside in the 1930s. What is striking is the richness of the lives of the people and animals he writes about. There is bitter cold, rain, and war, dirty barns and deep snow, but there is also the deeply satisfying beauty of open countryside, and the unpredictable revelations that come from living with and among other species. There is also the unrelenting labor that comes with making a living in agriculture. "Them were hard days," says a retired farmer wistfully, "hard but good." Herriot also describes unflinchingly the characters who have been ground down to dour rancor by too many hard and hopeless days. That is one of the reasons that so few people today are in agriculture. You don't have weekends, holidays, or guaranteed sick days. You don't have much time or energy for philosophizing or art. And yet your life is art, but it's not the kind of art that is clean and shiny and for sale. It's unpredictable, often quite grubby, and just as often blazingly glorious. It is not something that you can buy at Neiman-Marcus, ever. You find your art in your hard but good days, in the poetry of making.

Ua on Big Pharma

My daughter, Ua, who is 8, said something hilarious, and sad, last night as we were driving home. She said thoughtfully: "I don't know about these "doctors", they are making up all these drugs and nobody wants to buy them." I laughed. Undeterred, she continued with her business analysis: "Grandma and Grandpa use Tylenol and Advil, so I guess they are doing OK, but Symbacort and all these other ones that have ads on TV, nobody wants them. But they just keep making more and more ads."

The Power of Limits

"To hard-core nationalists and neoconservatives, the acceptance of limits suggests retrenchment or irreversible decline. In fact, the reverse is true. Acknowledging the limits of American power is a precondition for stanching the losses of recent decades and for preserving the hard-won gains of earlier generations going back to the founding of the Republic. To persist in pretending that the United States is omnipotent is to exacerbate the problems that we face. The longer Americans ignore the implications of dependency and the longer policy makers nurture the pretense that this country can organize the world to its liking, the more precipitous will be its slide when the bills finally come due.
A realistic appreciation of limits, on the other hand, creates opportunities to adjust policies and replenish resources - perhaps even to renew institutions. Constraints subject old verities to reconsideration, promote fresh thinking, and unleash creativity.

Andrew J. Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, 174.