Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Kahuna Magic (published originally IN THE TOTE, 2011)


Writer, fisherman and father Hillel Wright gestured as he leaned out of the sun, into the shade under the canopy at the Kava Café in Havi. He glanced at his grandson Ollie then summarized the tale he’d just told – “It’s the whole philosophy of commercial fishing.”

Now living in Japan, the green-eyed, mustached former PHD candidate should know - he spent thirty years at sea fishing the Pacific and now writes for Fishing News International a leading fishing publication of Asia. 

It all started in Hawaii in 1969 on a 60 foot diesel sampan named “Alika.”

“Late one night, my friend calls and tells me that if I can make Hilo Docks by 4:30 AM there’s a job for me,” Wright said, sipping an Americano. “I bought a Renault Dauphine down the street for 200 bucks, drove it as fast as I could and by the time I rolled into the Suisan parking lot, the motor was toast. It would never run again, but I got the job.”

Single, fresh out of Southern Illinois University with a master’s in Literature, the soon to be father of four slid 5 tons of block ice across the dock that morning filling the cold hatch. It was the beginning of the fall season and for the next two months he’d be working off the Puna coast, five days a week, 20 hours a day with four other men, hot-bunking and pulling in ahi by day and mahi-mahi, and walu by night.

Under the direction of a Hawaiian Captain, “Old Man John” the fishing in those days was pretty good.

“He knew how to find fish,” Wright said.”He’d look out over the sea as dawn crept up and watch the birds. ‘Aku birds,’ he’d say and then ‘Ahi birds – go, go, steer 280.’ And before you know we’d be full of fish.”

“By the third week, I had the program down,” Wright said. “One day I’d just finished laying in the insulation in the ice hold and sat down on the hatch cover and lit a cigarette. I was watching the sea when I heard Old Man John yell something at me. I couldn’t make it out, it was Hawaiian and then finally he’s in may face and yells in English, ‘No sit on Ass!’ and that, in one sentence is the whole philosophy of commercial fishing.”

Moana Loa, the mountain towering above the Puna coast also had philosophy that year. It was the year that Mauna Ulu, a vent of Kilauea erupted.

“We were twenty miles off shore working bottom fish. Then it blows,” Wright said. “You never saw fireworks like that. Old Man John, or Ahab as I knew him up to that point, suddenly gets nice. He tells us to pull in the hooks, make a pot of tea and sit down on deck. His whole personality changed, he became grandpa. Told us about Madam Pelu, his Alamakuu, as the boat rocked and the vent blew oranges and reds into the sky.”

Wright lives with his wife Shiori in Kawasaki and wears a gold wedding ban inscribed with eagles, “they mate for life.” On the same hand a thick turquoise ring covers nearly the bottom joint of his index finger. He grips it and twirls it on his finger. 

“Helps with my spiritual risk taking,” he said. “All religions are one,” he said as an Aloha Petroleum tanker passed by on Mamalahoa Highway, shaking the ground. “I try to follow the local customs, live life and make my pilgrimages.”

He comes to the Big Island regularly, a place where his first daughter Anita was born, and always makes Hapuna Beach - he lived there when it was a county park during the summer of 1969.

“There was a bunch of us hippies. Tourists, locals, high school girls all came to the park. Everybody wanted to see what we were up to. We slept under the stars at night, stowed our stuff under the picnic tables – nobody stole back then. We combed the beaches in the morning for money. Occasionally the Aku boats would anchor at the cove to catch bait. We’d snorkel out to them, they’d throw their gill nets and we’d chase the Weki into their nets.”

Wright follows a lizard with his eyes, as the reptile slinks across a hou-hou wall.

“I stayed in one of the A frames last week,” he said. “Walked down the beach late the first night and heard the Matahunas singing. You don’t believe me?”

Wright edited five books and wrote another five including an interview he did with Beat Poet Allen Ginsberg.

“He had quite a mind, and quite an agenda. And for the most part it all worked together,” Wright said.

At sea on the “Alika,” Wright recalls the smell of salt air, the warm blood of tuna and a Louisville Slugger that Old Man John used on the ahi that came flying over the rail.

“He was pretty good with it,” Wright said.

Before flying to the Big Island, that summer of ’69, Wright spent a month in Berkeley, hanging out, learning Zen-Buddha chants and hitchhiking.

The first question they asked me the morning I arrived at the Alika was whether I was a hippie. ‘No,’ I told them, ‘I’m a gypsy.’ So they called me Egypt. A few days later as we waited for the fish to bite, I start chanting. And almost immediately, the ahi start biting. I remember Old Man John shaking his head, saying, ‘Da Kina Egypt, singing for fish,’” Wright said, as he looked out across the patio of the café. “There I was, a Jew named Egypt singing Buddhist chants on a Hawaiian boat. Kahuna magic, I guess.”

Thursday, August 4, 2011

Bluefin and You

Caring will get you in trouble. It guarantees heart break, tears, and a conscious seining in the sea of emotion. Often painful, it is no wonder many have given up on it after experiencing one too many tragedies. Like many man-made tragedies, greed often propels the misfortune. And such is the case of the Atlantic Bluefin Tuna.

In March of last year the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species (CITEC) met in Qatar and voted not to place the decimated Atlantic Bluefin Tuna on the endangered species list. Commercial extinction of the species has already occurred with stocks in Brazil, USA, Canada and the North Sea, and the Mediterranean stock, 85 per cent depleted and the last commercial vestige of the species, seems tied to the same sinker.

Eighty per cent of the commercially caught bluefin tuna is exported to Japan, where the rich dark purple flesh commands a premium as the much sought after maguro sushi. Some of these fish have auctioned at over $200,000 at Tokyo’s Tsukiji Fish Market.

According to Matt Rigney, author of In Pursuit of Giants, Japan informed the world prior to the Qatar meeting that they would ignore any CITEC restriction on the species.

In March of this year the Obama administration rejected placing the fish on the endangered species list. According to Sen. Snowe (R., Maine) “Such a listing would have unilaterally penalized US fisherman.”

But the jobs issue might be deceptive.

“The number of jobs lost in sports and commercial fishing alone on the eastern seaboard of the United States because of the collapse of our bluefin tuna population in the 1980’s is just one indication of the costs of bad fisheries management,” said Rigney. “…it represents both the loss of income to tens of thousands of fisherman and hundreds of local communities, as well as the radical concentration of wealth in the hands of a few – to the tune of 16.4 billion between 1998 and 2008.”

A primordial law of ecology is that everything is connected. Whether the flapping wings of a butterfly in Africa can cause a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico is up for grabs but a school of tuna eating mackerel is very much part of food chain balance. This week in Science magazine 24 scientists from 6 countries warned of the consequences we face as the planets top predators are eliminated. The report suggests that the dramatic decline of wolves and lions, sharks and tuna may be one of the most destructive human influences on the natural world.

“Apex consumers… have powerful effects on the ways ecosystems work, and the loss of these large animals has widespread implications,” said Professor James Estes of the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Tropic cascade or the impact on plants and animals lower in the food chain was evidenced when urchin-eating sea otter declined in population along the Pacific Coast in the 1990’s. In turn the kelp forests, one of the most dynamic and productive ecosystem on the planet, shriveled as the kelp-eating urchin population exploded.

When wolves were eliminated from Yellowstone Park, elk in large herds overgrazed the sensitive woodland environment. Wolves are now being reintroduced there.

The wolf is no longer a factor in Texas. The last reported Canus Lupis was shot at Castolon in the Big Bend National Park on a cold January day in 1957. However, the elusive Mountain Lion, another apex predator, has survived despite an open season on the animal in our Lone Star State.

The bluefin is a majestic fish that can swim at bursts up to 60 mph, through water that is seven hundred times denser than air. It grows up to eleven feet long, weighing 1000 pounds and can leap out of the water twenty feet and dive to 3000 feet to catch its prey. It crosses the Atlantic in ten days and spawns every spring in the Gulf of Mexico.

A pre-BP Oil Spill estimate of the Atlantic Bluefin population administered by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna suggested 5 million exist from fingerlings the size of a thumbnail to breeding age fish. That’s 1600 humans to every Atlantic Bluefin. In west Texas there’s 1600 flies to every human. So why should we care about a fish in the sea?

Maybe we shouldn’t, there’s pain in caring.

Friday, July 22, 2011

Where Are the Philosophers?

Harry V. Jaffa wrote:

“Politics is inherently controversial because humans are passionately attached to their opinions by interests that have nothing to do with the truth. But because philosophers… have no interest other than the truth, they alone can bring the canon of reason that will transform the conflict of opinion that otherwise dominates the world. “

But where are the philosophers?

Most of the philosophers of this country are drinking at the trough of economic stability. Lapping away at $100,000 a year salaries can suck the philosopher right out of you and fitting in to corporate culture can have its perks; electro-magnetic golf, sex hormone chewing gum and a bottle of soma.

What?

In his Foreword to the second printing (1946) of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley explained the underlying calm in his 632 A.F. fictional dystopia, “The masses don’t have to be coerced because they love their servitude.”

The problem of making people love their servitude is a function of economic security and economic security serves as part of the indoctrinating machinery of the novel as expressed in the World State’s motto; “Community, Identity, Stability”.

But now with exposure of the feckless “limitless GNP growth” theory, Wall Street honor and other extraction economy myths, we might see a few more philosophers falling from stability and coming back to where great societies need them: asking the hard questions about our politics and politicians. As Huxley wrote, “…greater triumph of propaganda has been accomplished not by doing something but by refraining from doing. Great is truth but silence about truth is greater.”

Sunday, July 3, 2011

Sandra from Uganda



Sandra Basudde smiles easily at the picnic table at Waiohinu, on the south end of the Big Island. Her teeth sparkle as light from the sun peeks through an opening in the clouds. An ajoite crystal hangs from one necklace, a tetrahedron from another, and there’s an Ugandan pendant on the lapel of her blue jean jacket. It’s a long road from Africa to the Big Island but for Sandra the journey is never over.

“I came here in response to a spiritual call,” she said, her dreadlocks hanging from beneath a swaddled purple and black head scarf. “I go whenever I am called in the moment. I go where my energy can be of best value. If you stay too long in the wrong place you lose the resonance of your purpose.”

Sandra works at an organic farm called Ailani Orchard in the green strip between Ocean View and Na’a’le’hu. She works most days at the Fruit Stand located on the Belt Road at mile marker 68 where the products of the farm are sold; citrus, six types of avocado, macadamia nuts, coffee, and lamb.

“I tell the lambs, ‘If you over populate, we’ll put you on the plate,’” Sandra said, laughing in the way a vegetarian laughs at a meat joke.

“It’s a beautiful place to meet people from all over the world and makes for an interesting study. One gets to learn diverse perspectives and compassion for various states of mind and often I’m renewed by the potential of humans to transcend limits,” she said.

A nine year old boy visited the stand and according to Sandra, did an amazing thing.

“He called up the wind,” Sandra said. “On a day when there was absolutely not even a breeze, the wind came out of nowhere --and after it shook the branches of the trees, he summoned it away. He told me it was his natural state of communion with the wind.” She paused and looked toward the sea. “Then again we see what we are ready to perceive.”

Sandra dreams of creating retreat centers throughout the world to revive and encourage the human spirit to transcend limits in thought and being-ness.

“My SPIRIT Re-Treat Centers are already manifest, yet they have not precipitated yet from the standpoint of our shared reality,” she said. “Minimal facilitation is the direction I want to go but mentors on the premises would be available. I want spirituality centered on nature. This nature includes humans re-establishing their co-creation with the earth as a living entity of which we are but a small part.”

She takes a breath of the cool Ka’u air and continues, “I want to collaborate with artists to build gigantic Buddha and Jesus slides, Isis wing swings, crystal caves, huge soundproof domes and yurts for energy enhancement and a library that offers many modalities.”

She talks about private property as a limit to the evolution of humanity.

“It’s a cornerstone of capitalism and perhaps human nature, if there is such a thing,” she says. “But I think to overcome the gap between rich and poor and to transcend our problems in corporal reality we must move beyond private property. Yet at the same time I feel the need to set basic boundaries at the retreats, to have a certain look and feel and that in itself is a form of private property.”

She looks out across the manicured grass of the park and adds, “Maybe I’ll have a sign out front that reads, ‘Trespassers Welcome.’”

Children now gather around the picnic table and Sandra pulls from her purse a poem she wrote with rhyming couplets. The children listen. She looks up after finishing and says, “Spirit, Science, God – it’s all the same thing.”

At the farm, workers rotate and occasionally Sandra helps with the packaging of the macadamia and coffee. She also works in the fields where she “listens to the land” and takes breaks “under the trees taking in the elements.”

It’s all there, nature is our true teacher, our tonic. To be spiritually divorced from the land,” she shakes her head then points toward the trees, the ti, the orchids nestled against the green hills. “That is our spirit.”

Sandra spent the first four years of her life in Entebbe, Uganda, as dictator Milton Obote was stepping down to Idi Amin’s genocidal regime. Her family immigrated to Germany where she attended school in Bonn. Later she moved to Kansas City, then Scottsdale, Philadelphia and Ashland, Oregon.

She says that her spirituality “comes from the place of no words.” “Sac-cid-ananda” is another expression she uses to describe the aboriginal genesis of her spiritual beginnings and links it with the Big Island.

“I love the Big Island,” she said. “Its primordial and you can’t hide from it.”

Sandra believes the land can be known through the food that is eaten from it.

“We are what we eat energetically, spiritually, mentally, emotionally, physically and sub-atomically. We are one and holographic in nature. When we bite into a mango we are intersecting with an energetic formation. It is possible to become acquainted with that energy and form a symbiotic relationship.”

“I’m also working to analyze soil, through the taste of food,” she said. “But I’m not that good yet.”

She also believes that one of her purposes in life is to be a cog in spiritual midwifery.

“The highest honor I can receive is to know that I’ve been part of the supporting cast,” Sandra said. “To bring people to a higher awareness of themselves – to have a relationship with themselves, because we are our own experiments and divinity resides in each of us.”

Rain drizzles and we decide to go to a restaurant.

“Good, good, sometimes I forget to eat,” She says as her thin body slips easily through the car door. Her purse catches. Sheet paper with notes reading “21 frequencies – Tuesday: rose, pink, scarlet, Wednesday: blue, violet, magenta” falls from it. Sandra takes it, “Frequencies,” she announces, laughs, and stuffs it back in her purse. Then she looks out the window as we drive down the road, the tires humming against the wet pavement, wipers clicking in the gray air and she says, “Molecules have been everywhere.”



Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Hemingway on Zelda Fitzgerald

From A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway (1964) published posthumously

"He (F. Scott Fitzgerald) had many good, good friends, more than anyone I knew. But I enlisted as one more, whether I could be of any use to him or not. If he could write a book as fine as The Great Gatsby I was sure that he could write an even better one. I did not know Zelda yet, and so I did not know the terrible odds that were against him. But we were to find them out soon enough."

Sal Si Puedes (Leave, if you can)

Peter Matthiessen's 1970 one paragraph description of Ceasar Chavez in the book Sal Si Puedes

"The man who has threatened California has a Indian's bow nose and lank black hair, with sad eyes and an open smile that is shy and friendly; at moments he is beautiful, like a dark seraph. He is five feet six inches tall, and since his twenty-five day fast the previous winter, has weighed no more than one hundred and fifty pounds. Yet the word "slight" does not properly describe him. There is an effect of being centered in himself so that no energy is wasted, an effect of density; at the same time, he walks as lightly as a fox. One feels immediately that this man does not stumble, and that to get where he is going he will walk all day."

Monday, February 21, 2011

Ka Lea

“Only you would drive on a donut around the island, especially the Big Island,” Nina said just a few minutes before the donut blew out stranding us at Miloli’i Road, 30 miles from Ka Lea, 80 miles from home. Sitting in the seats again, the car moving backwards, high on top of the tow truck, we take in the sights, things we’d never seen driving car-low, things like matching jeep trucks parked in a circle, caribou and ostriches chewing cud, below the grade at Ka’u Macadamia Farm.

Enlightment is always possible, even though we’re two hundred in the hole now– but not all kids get to ride on a tow truck!

Back on the road, common again at heights not known for seeing beyond the standard limits, we stop at a restaurant instead of a park, to eat and blow the rest of our trip budget.

It’s late and we’ve missed all our appointments; Wolf with the Yurt, Sandra from Uganda, and the jewelry box we left on the last excursion to Ka Lea.

The Hawaiian pork was good and the ahi fresh and we feel fat and sleepy and we drive to Black Sands Park late and its full and we drive to Whittington and its full and it’s off to windy Ka Lae and we know the drill, don’t drive off the cliff in the night, into the ocean, into depths so deep and water so clear you could almost be thankful for such a splendid grave. We try to find some lee and by midnight we park in a little depression far enough from the cliffs that if you forgot where you were, and woke to pee, you’d probably wouldn’t walk that far.

The kids are awake and excited because they like Ka Lae, the red lights of the wind turbines flashing red in the distance, the wind and the sound of ocean swells pounding the volcanic crust below.

We pull out our sleeping bags – I don’t think it’s going to rain, although clouds are everywhere – but this is Ka Lae, a coastal desert and it’s never rained on us before and we’ve been through enough this night. Mesa and Reef wiggle between the sleeping bags, maybe they’ll sing together, sing themselves to sleep like they did here Christmas night but they horse around in a different way and then give it up – dead asleep now in the soft grass, next to the Crown Vic, our shield against wayward drivers in the night.

Two cars appear, their sound wholly muted by the wind and waves and only the lights glide by, like a mirage following a road, turning, climbing, gone.

Tomorrow might be a better day, in terms of things to accomplish, and maybe we’ll get to Puna and look at those 8 acres and they’ll be just what we want after all those months of looking, looking for the farm land and climate that will make everyone happy and give us reason to stay on the Big Island. But deep down I know that the wetness of Puna and the thin volcanic soil and the fact that no house exists will make it hard and I wonder if I really want that at this stage of life, might I play it safe and live in what’s already established?

The full moon backlights the dark clouds that push across the sky as the trades direct them east to west. We lie on the southern-most tip of the USA, latitude 19, a little over 1000 miles to the middle circumference of the earth and watch occasional stars beckon between clouds and the children sleep heavy and I want to file this moment, for the times ahead, maybe for the final reel, so that I can be happy before death.

Tomorrow is already itself, untouched and nothing I can do can to change that – so I ask to sleep as the first puff of rain drizzles down. It stops and starts again a little heavier this time and stops and then bursts but stops again and I stand and look at what’s coming and far out in the distance beyond the land, is that light over the sea?

The rain will pass, but doesn’t and now everybody is up, the tarp duck-taped to the car to make a poor lean to and the foot end of the sleeping bags sticking out, soaked and Nina sniffles and coughs and now sneezes and I say, “There’s some light just out there,” but I don’t really believe it myself.

Saturday, February 5, 2011

Mahukona Cats


A herd of cats mingle in the early morning shade of the kiawe forest, some rubbing against the gray trunks others perch on curved limbs licking their paws, sweeping them wet across checkered faces, glancing occasionally with feline non-chalance down the trail where Norman Fojtasek pulls a cart with food and water.

The stray cats of Mahukona Park, 100 of them by Fojtasek’s estimate, have friends. For eleven years advoCATS Inc. with a volunteer staff has organized daily feedings for the feral cats of the Kona Coast.

“As of the end of last year we’ve documented 9,574 cats in our region,” Cathy Swedelius said, President of advoCATS in Kona.

In addition to the feedings, regular workshops featuring volunteer veterinarians provide additional feline services that include spay and neutering, vaccinations, ear cleaning for mites, lotions, flea treatments and de-worming.

“We can do 80-150 cats in a one day workshop,” Swedelius said.

Fojtasek has been volunteering with advoCATS for two years. He moved to the Big Island in 1989 from Dallas Texas. At 69, he’s frisky and attributes his good health to a lifetime of Judo and a “handful of supplements” he takes every morning. He’s been involved with a number of local organizations but seems content with advoCATS.

“I was part of the Sovereign Movement, but they’re too disorganized,” he said, filling a stainless cat bowl with Meow Mix. “Now I just donate to the cats.”

He pulls the cart across a rocky trail.

“See that one?” He points to a calico. “She got dropped off about a week ago. I was going to give her to a friend but she went wild fast. It doesn’t take long for them to go feral and once they’re wild it’s hard to get it out of them.”

Most of the cats at Mahukona, according to Fojtasek, have been dropped off.

“Seems to be more of that here lately,” Fojtasek said. “People can’t afford’em.”

Across the way and higher on the hill Janet Mattos un-straps a jug of water from her cart. She’s been feeding the cats for 7 years.

“They all have names,” she said. “There’s Boots – he’s an old timer.” Boots lifts his chin up then looks out toward the ocean.

But not everyone is for feeding the feral cats at the park.

“I had a guy follow me around last year as I was feeding,” Fojtasek said. “Kept asking me ‘why’ and telling me ‘there are too many cats already’ – finally I told him he’s fat and needs to be more concerned about his weight problem.”

Linus, a grower from Humboldt who comes to Hawaii every winter, sits at a picnic table and watches for whales as the pounding surf sprays in the foreground.

“All these cats are disgusting,” he said. “I’m going to start a petition. There’s too many of them. The place reeks of cat urine – you should be here when the wind isn’t blowing. Flies like you wouldn’t believe. Cat fights all night long. Hell, a fellow can hardly get any sleep around here. This use to be a great park but now it’s a xz!xzx!z?! zoo.”

Linus takes a breath and leans back. “I watch these guys come in every morning and feed them. I say shoot the cats and throw them in the sea.”

A thin white cat stares from the black rip rap along the shore, then turns, jumps across the rocks and disappears into the Kiawe forest.