Saturday, February 18, 2006
the Hawai`i experience.
Our experiences here on the Big Island of Hawaii are starting to pile up, much faster than we can write about them. Plus when we are at the computer, the time is mostly spent trying to keep the mainland money flowing... leaving little typing endurance for writing about our experiences here. But, in an attempt to try to write more, we are going to try dividing up the pages. For now, tolver will be updating the Hawaii page with his experiences, while I will try to write mine here, in my Blog.Today I want to try to get to some of the stuff that I have been piling up, so this might turn out a little disjointed, with me trying to say to many things at once, but here goes!
The first experience that seems to be important for me to relate has to do with working the land. Almost every other day I still have to hitch-hike the 7 miles into Pahoa to sit at this PC and stay connected to the internet, but on the days that we don't, we tend to stay on the farm and either work the land for our hosts, or work on our own shelter and surrounding area. I really love opening up the paths that surround our shelter. There were just a couple of "paths" when we started, but then there were also dozens of tiny "pig trails". A Pig trail is usually about 6 inches wide, and maybe a foot and a half high through the denser growth. It would really be neato to be able to shrink myself down to gnome size and see where they all go! Since I can't do that, we use them as a starting point, and clipper away the ferns, weed trees and cane grass until these paths become passable by people our size. I had always wanted a chance to construct and play within a hedge maze! now I am doing just that! I will call it The Menehune Maze, because they may look like pig trails, but we hear the Menehune at night!
After using the hosts aging clippers for the first couple of weeks, we made the trek to Walmart (about an hour bus ride away, in Hilo) and I bought a new pair of clipping shears for $8.88, and clipping has become one of my primary jobs. I have to go back and clean up each trail every couple of days, but they have also been very useful for the main job that I have been doing for the hosts: cane grass removal. The cane grass grows 5 to 12 feet high, and would strangle the whole property if we didn't keep at it constantly. So we hack away at it, with the clippers, and machete. Ah, the machete. I am 38 years old, and I think that I have had my first true testosterone experience! hacking at cane grass with the machete. After about an hour of intense hacking and whacking I completed a field surrounding a large weed tree, that we were clearing for a later date with the chainsaw, I let out a primal scream and felt the juice flowing through my vains. I ran up the hill and took my mate! heh.
OK, so the last experience that I will have time to relate today, will be about our time at Kehena beach yesterday. (See the pictures) Yes we do get to go to the beach, we don't just work every day; although this was only our second time. After swimming in the ocean (body tempeture in February) I just sat back on the beach and allowed the energy of the environment effect me. It was wondrous, and we saw whales. And I thought to myself how cool it would be to develop a visualization algorithm that would be like watching the ocean for whales, with the occasional moments of wonder and excitement. Yet, later, I realized how strange it was to want to try to re-create something that was so wonderful experienced live, with something that was just video imagery. My outlook on reality must be changing...
I will leave you with that, until next time.
Labels: Hawaii
link | posted by Reese at 11:49 AM