This represents a well-known fragment from Gilda’s Journal. It is one of my favorite pieces in all of the Archive. Anything I could add would be superfluous and take away from the depth of this work. I therefore provide it without commentary.
No one will find me here. To the southeast hangs the friendly gibbous orb I’ve known all my life occasioning a path of serene white moonlight reflecting across the top of the ocean, fulgent in the breakers. To the north a sulfurous fog steaming off of Kilauea obscures the low stars. They say in a few weeks the lava might reach here and cover this spot. I hope not. Perhaps the ghosts of the ancient Hawaiians will hold it at bay. This is a sacred spot I am told. I gently breathe in good sea air. I am sitting on a spit of land jutting out from an unpretentious lagoon that makes this place susceptible for basking in nature’s sorceries. I am alone. Inhaling the moist oceanic ether drives away the fear, or some of it anyway.
I look back over to my bivouac and see the reflection of my fire against the black lava rock wall that guards my camp. What was that rectangular ruin of piled stones once constructed to be? A temple? A home? A hut for a fisherman who whiled away his time mending net and line to catch his family’s dinner? I want to think temple. This seems the kind of place I would raise one had I the inclination to give into certain temptations. I just cooked a pan of Japanese noodles and opihi that I picked from the wave-caressed rocks this afternoon.
A kind old Filipino man who ran the little mom and pop store in the town of Volcano introduced this delicious shellfish to me. When he saw I had a transradial prosthesis, he asked if I had been in Nam. I answered yes, managing to lie while telling the truth since I was implying that’s where I lost my hand. He told me his son had died there. His eyes watered and we were soon talking, I told him I had been a POW for two years. I don’t tell anyone that, but it all spilled out of me like a confession. Soon we were both in tears telling each other stories that burst from us like some sort of emotional flatulence. Ironic given the purpose of the trip was to leave that event behind.
He then told me about Apua Point, the loneliest spot on the island—a six-mile backpack from the most southern point of the Chain of Craters Road. He told me about the opihi, something he would normally never tell a tourist. He also warned me about the rats that would try to steal my food. He didn’t know that the promised presence of rats would guarantee my visit to the spot. Isolation and rats. What could be better?
The taste of opihi may have been worth spilling the beans about how I spent the last few years. Wow. A delicacy worthy of royalty. A gastropod that clings to the rocks like a barnacle, they are found throughout the islands. I climbed out on the rocks to gather them, watching the untamed waves beating the island back into the sea with such violence it left me holding my breath. With each smash of the waves against the rocky shore, I felt a surge of wrath from the ocean both frightening and exhilarating. One slip and I would be feeding the crabs and fish below.
You have to sneak up on these little hors d’oeuvres. Like the clams beguiled by the walrus and the carpenter in Alice in Wonderland. If you make your intentions known you lose them. You have to climb among them without touching them, then squatting down, work swiftly, by sliding a knife between their shell and the rock, all before the next murderous wave strikes. You can pry them off of the hardened lava with a flick of your wrist, but if they catch what you are about, they clamp down on the basalt and you’ve missed your chance. I don’t even think you could chisel them off the rock face.
Shaped like a conical rice paddy hat, they are open on one side and therein lies their precious meat, a gelatinous mass that I scooped into the Chinese rice noodles boiling in my tin mess pan. When the shahe fen was cooked, I was delighted to find that the fleshy mass had shaped itself into a little rubber miniature of a snail-like creature complete with a slug-like nose, upraised neck, and little antennae. And the taste? Indescribable. It tasted like all that I fancy in seafood, fashioned and condensed into a single untamed flavor.
My first night I placed the remains of my dinner on a flat rock and waited hoping to lure in some rats. They never showed. I sat near the pebble-sand shore and watched the waves and composed a poem. This one:
The Moon
The woman on the newly hardened rocks
of ancient lineage—was seeing the stars for
the first time in ages. The moon—old friend,
distant comrade—grinned at the cooled lava
as the sea ebbed and rolled at the pahoho’s
black and jagged edge, old friends reuniting.
She stood singleton, alone, a stranger amid the
supposed rats and mongooses that wound their way
among the succulent xerophytes along the shore
(the clever beasts survive by snatching whatever the tides
toss out in its heaving or whatever they can
take from trekkers to this lonely spot,
though none came to her).
She was wild and unafraid of what ghosts
might abound. And of which she’d been warned.
She too, like the kindred moon
and the natal rock, was brewed from the violence
of an exploding sun. She felt the kinship of
She reminisced. She and the waves and the rock and the
moon told their singular tales and even as poorly
as they understood each other, some implied
gesture came through and all were content
to sit and ponder their separation and their reuniting.
At this moment. On this night. Each alone and each
together, bound by bonds of old magic and power
that not one of them understood nor even wanted to,
as they bathed in the darkness and the light
remembering and forgetting.
It is the second night. To get to the end of this rocky promontory, I passed a line of squat and stunted palms, ragged and unkempt. Not like the tall and stately palms that line Southern Californian boulevards. The fronds are stringy and torn, displaying a wildness like some ancient forest hermit, bearded with tangled rattan stripped from the fibrous bark. Woven in the nest-like mess found at the base of the leaves, debris from the wind gathers, adding to a bedding structure that guard the gargantuan floating seeds provisioned with their own milky supply of fresh water. Around the trees, sun-bleached coconuts are scattered haphazardly about—a few have leaked a phallic root probing the sand for anchorage.
I walk carefully over the rocks to the end of the jetty and find a flat rock to act as a seat. My lap is my desk. Tonight I want to ponder objects again. To explore the old questions that interested me before the disruption that stole so much from me and replaced my ruminations with jagged scars and unhealing wounds.
That past must be set aside for a time. Stoically, perhaps, but I must seize again old puzzles. What is it to be an object? How do things connect? I fear everything must be repackaged in light of things my mind or my heart now wants to orbit. Twice now in vision, love has pushed itself forward as the first principle of concern. First in my vision of the cosmos, and second with my vision of Heavenly Mother. I don’t know if I’ve gained insight into the outer world or inner, or if there is a difference, but I seem to be being led, either by my brain or the universe—it’s hard to say which, for it is hard to escape the old quandary of whether the world wheels in freedom or by fixed determination—if these experiences are immanent or transcendent.
I open my gambit with the moon. I look up and see its face. I know light waves are bouncing off its surface from the sun, disclosing the presence of this object that lies 238,900 miles from the earth.1 I learn more by seeing the variation in color and texture. I see craters and I have explanations as to why they form, giving me a hint that whatever the moon is, it is craterizable. Recently, a few men have visited there and brought back rocks that reveal more about its rocky surface.
I also look out over the ocean and consider the rise and fall of tides swaying according to the moon’s pleasure. Yet much of this immense sea remains masked. Like the apple seed I so long labored over that I tried to trick into revealing its nature, yet as always some part remains hidden. As Heraclitus says, “Nature tends to hide itself.”2 I wonder if the only way to understand the moon (or an apple seed) fully is to be that thing. Yet even that can’t be right. I cannot even fully uncover myself to myself, so what could the moon reveal to itself? I often surprise myself and discover myself in new ways. I understand myself no better for being conscious. Therefore as a meaty object I am a mystery to my conscious self: I cannot feel my liver livering, or my kidney kidneying. Does that mean that this thing that makes me, that binds me to cells, to organelles, to the structure of bone and flesh, runs deeper than I can feel? I don’t know what it means to be the moon or a seed. I should back up for I do not mean consciously. But I notice that things ‘feel’ other things. They interact. They touch. They react to each other, like the items in my study of junk drawer ecology.
So it seems like a thing-in-itself is not revealed even to itself, but only in relation to other things. Alone an object or a thing is nothing. A moon in a universe that held only a moon would not be there. It would have no properties until it related to other things, things that, relating, give it size, structure, and all the rest. The moon is revealed by the light of the sun, by the pull of the earth, by the foot that walks and leaves footprints in the dust. And I similarly find myself manifest by the moon and its shine. By the relations in which I stand—by rocks and ancient lava, by the photonic absorption of the light of thousands of stars, by the sound of the ocean splashing against the shore, by opihi and its shell, by the sedges and sparse plants pushing through grains of sands, by the relationship of those plants and the sand as individual grains and individual plants and their shells, by the birds which pipe on the shore and their feathers which fall on the ground and are washed to shore from the sea and that gather with other detritus forming bands of debris of which that feather is but a piece of the structure that traps the foam of the sea, upon which small fleas dance and play and capture meager nutrients created by bacteria decomposing that debris with patience and relentless acts of decay, and by the palms which create shade and places where certain molds can form that create spaces for newer sanctuaries from which to launch new plants and plant systems into the world. Here I stand in relation to an infinity of other objects and an infinity of relationships of objects to one another, which create new objects like the waves created by moon and ocean which structure and mold other objects and on and on and on. Is there so much of me that like Whitman I can claim I am multitudes? How can such a small person stretch out and reach myriads of infinities upon infinities? How is their room for all those relationships? How can I hold so much? To be me must take infinite work as relationships compound into more connections than I can fathom. It cannot be conscious, of course, because even my neurons are part of a deeper structure—pieces of chemicals, the relation of brain states formed by some flicker dispatched from, say, a fly that happens to skip past my eye, which in turn launches a cascade of neuronal triggers that cause my eye to blink. An event that signifies nothing but a random event, most of which must be ignored or perish in trying to actively attend to everything. There is too much for that. My brain must be selective.
And so I let go. I cannot hold it all so I let go. I let the moon bathe me in its light and let the sound of the waves wash over me and feel the fresh breeze play upon the palms and rocks and cry and careen through objects. I integrate these into a feeling of peace and enjoy the flavor of the objects around me and suddenly I am no more multitudes but am one thing, a unit, a moment. I take in a breath and sense that the tangle and bundle that I am melts away into a puddle of one. I am suddenly a gift to myself. I am not bracketing out questions of what defines me but bracketing in a wholeness, a stitching. I do not want to say I’m ‘one’ like some Siddhartha for I’m not. I am still many, but I’ve come to be a togetherness. A unity, not a oneness. Like wine aged into one flavor. Its parts can be separated, but its flavor is unified and coherent despite the multitudes it contains. Or, more crassly, the corkscrew that pulled the cork, a device that comes together to form a simple machine, created by combining machines like the wedge and lever to create a new thing that in its unity relates to the wine in specific ways. A community. An ecology. An inhabitant of a universe of objects, uses, relationships, creating novelty and hope. And there it is! A new object. Perhaps every object is just a confederation among other objects. Objects are just connections coming together in a community of interrelationship. Relations all the way down. Can you think of a single counter example?
Where of love then? Tomorrow. My sleeping bag is calling me to its folds.
Later
They showed up about noon. I had just taken a pleasant swim in my miniature private lagoon. I was sunbathing naked on the beach when, thankfully, I heard them approaching from a long way off because they were arguing about something. I hurriedly dressed. When they walked into camp, I greeted them cordially enough. They were as friendly as a couple of Labrador retrievers. She had sandy blonde hair curled in the humidity and was wearing a yellow flowered bikini top, cut off Levis, a straw cowboy hat, and some expensive hiking boots. The woman was also tall, tanned, and athletic. He was rather more nondescript, rotund, wearing gym shorts and sneakers. His hair was long, dark brown down to his shoulders. He had a short beard.
They plopped their packs down by a rock near the shore and he introduced them both with, “Hi I’m Mikey and this is my old lady, Judy.”
She was bending down to fish out their canteens, but popped up long enough to wave. I intentionally waved back with my stub, startling them for a second, but they seemed not to be bothered otherwise. He told me that they had come down through the Kau Desert. I said nothing about my route. They were hiking all the way to Hilo through Puna. I tried not to let my disappointment show.
“We heard there was water here and thought we would stop for a few days.”
This was supposed to be a time of solitude. This was a time to reflect and sort things out that had been confused for a long time. In our short conversation I had learned enough about them to know I had no desire to spend time with them and I was feeling desperate so I flat out lied, “Yeah, I heard the same, but it’s all dried up … supposed to be over there by the trees, but I can’t find it.”
I was pointing in the opposite direction from the water. The water was hidden in a small cave a few hundred meters westward and even with the detailed directions I’d been given it had been genuinely hard to find. The entrance was masked by some fairly thick shrubby and if I hadn’t noticed birds coming out of it I might never have found it. The water was brackish, but serviceable.
“Damn! These islanders are always filling us with shit. They say one thing and it turns out that it just ain’t so. Especially when going to somewhere they want left alone. They want to keep it for themselves. About fifty-million times we’ve been told something and it’s crap. They were probably hoping we would die out here.”
“Oh, I doubt that.” I said, although thinking, who could blame them? This was quite a pair. Given their equipment they were rich and given their accents they were from New England. A perfect combination to get snowed. The irony being that this time they had not been led astray by Islanders but by the haole they automatically assumed was on their side.
“Well we started with three canteens apiece and still have got a full one each, so we’ve got enough to make it to the Chain of Craters Road tomorrow. We’ll have to hitch a ride to the Park and fill up there. How are you fixed for water?”
I smiled and said I had enough to get by.
I showed them another camp about fifty yards from mine, identifiable by a ring of stones, but not protected from the wind by the remnant wall of a Heiau like mine.
I went for a walk. Looking for shells and just wanting to be alone. I felt guilty for lying to them about the water, but not contrite enough to want to spend two or three days with them. When I got back they were boiling dehydrated backpacking meals in seawater. Eggs and stroganoff. I was not going to tell them about the opihi. It seemed like the knowledge had been given to me as a trust. I was not going to betray it.
Looking back I feel miserable. They were not bad people. Generous. Talkative. But to me they were intruders. Corsairs of solitude. It made me combative and ornery.
The rest of the day I mostly avoided them. I went for a walk toward the Pali, an escarpment that rose from the coastal areas up toward Mauna Loa. I got back in time to watch the sun set, nothing spectacular, but nice. In Hawaii, I suppose because of its tropical latitudes, it gets dark quickly and when I returned to my camp, the backpackers had a roaring fire going. He was playing a ukulele he pulled from who-knows-where and they were singing some songs. For a moment I was annoyed, because I enjoy the silences of the wilderness, but I soon noticed that they were not that bad. Actually, they were pretty good and were pulling off some lovely Richard and Karen Carpenter-like harmonies. I listened while I got my own fire started and found myself softly singing along. Just as my fire was starting to reach a respectable burn, Judy came over.
“Hey,” she said. “We’ve got plenty of lasagna, we actually made three of the packets, just in case you wanted to join us. No worries if you want to be alone, we just wanted to offer … you know, in case …”
I resigned myself to their company, “Sure. Why not?”
Mikey gave me a royal welcome and made a place on a driftwood log they had pulled out of the surf just past the lagoon where it had been wedged among some boulders channeling the waves into a nook that held a small debris trap. I sat across from them with the fire between us, but they had kept the blaze small so that it was not inconvenient to interact with them across the flame. I remember our camps in Wyoming were usually graced with a fire half a person high and you would have to stand if you wanted to engage the person across the flames from you.
He kept playing while Judy made us paper plates piled with freeze-dried pasta—it had to be more than three packets—along with some freeze-dried corn. We all sat on the extempore benches and ate in silence. It took me a bit of balance and maneuvering to situate the plate on my lap in a way it was secure, and then use my left hand to eat with a small plastic fork. I’d left my mechanical hook in the car, not realizing I’d have to dine with company out here, so I felt like quite the spectacle. They were polite and said nothing as they watched my dinner-dance, my posture maneuvering and making endless adjustments with my stump designed to keep my plate from being upended. I managed. When it was over, we tossed our ware into the fire and watched the remains blacken, then burst into flames.
We sat for a while in a comfortable silence, then he reached into his pack and pulled out a pipe. The bowl was ceramic and the shaft, a cork-covered steel. He held it up and said, “OK if we smoke this?” I gave him an assenting shrug with a wave of my hand and said, “It’s cool.”
He loaded the pipe from a baggie and lit it with the flame from a twig. After puffing it to life he took a long hit and handed it to Judy and she did the same. She held it out to me and holding her breath hoarsed out, “It’s local. Puna Fire. Want to try it?” Then she exhaled a thick bluish tinted fog.
I’d not smoked pot since high school and since my last experience with a hallucinogenic had cost me my hand, getting high in the presence of a burning flame was not something my nervous system would let me get away with. Still, there was a slight temptation, but something inside me beat it down fairly quickly. I said, “I gave it up … I’m fine … so you two enjoy.”
The pipe was back in Mikey’s hand and he raised it to me in salute, as if both acknowledging and honoring my choice. They smoked it quietly, like me, watching the fire. Finally, he took a long draw, and then curled his fingers around the bowl making a funnel, and blew hard into his hand-fashioned trumpet, forcing abundant smoke out of the stem. Judy put her face over the smoke and breathed it in deeply trying to catch it all through her nose and mouth. She tried to supercharge him but he came up coughing, “It’s all resin, babe.”
They stared at the fire a while. Judy then said, “Wow. That was some gooood Shizzz.”
He answered, “Wow. It’s like … Wow.”
“Puna Fire.”
“Yeah, Puna Fire.”
“Good Shiizz.”
“Fine, Puna Fire. Better than that Maui Wowie.”
This went on for a while until it turned into a similar commentary on the stars, on the waves, and on the island.
“Fine Island.”
“Wow, really fine Island.”
“Yeah, fine Big Island.”
They started giggling and things until I figured I’d best go. I stood up to leave, when Mikey said, “So, sorry, we didn’t mean to leave you out. What snacks have you got out here? We packed light and forgot munchies, just the meals. It’s all that freeze dried crap.”
I explained my provisions were not much better. Mikey looked disappointed, but just shrugged, “OK, sit down and listen to this wild story we heard from the guy who like sold us this shizz.”
Judy giggled. “Mikey, tell her that story. It will freak you out to the max.”
Mikey was watching the waves from the surf roll in with a strange look on his face, like he had to keep an eye out for things, “You tell her, babe, but tell her it is creepy so watch out.”
“It’s creepy.”
I have to admit I was curious. For they no longer seemed to think everything was funny. My two stoners seemed unnerved and watchful, even as high as they obviously were.
“Go ahead, I’ll listen.”
“OK but remember, man, you are going to be creeped out.”
“Creeped out to the max.”
“Yeah, uber creepy.”
“OK, what happened?”
“Well, like the dude who sold us the weed, said that this was like true. It happened to his mother when she was like a little girl.”
“Yeah, like a little kid girl.”
So you get the idea. This story went on with constant interruptions between the two of them. Many distractions and asides. Several attempts to find something to eat in their packs and finally eating some nuts and raisins that I finally gave in and provided. There was a growing spookiness that had them almost cringing and whining in fear at one time, but in the end I had the story. It was creepy. I’ll tell it straight not as I heard it from the scattered and tossed fragments they offered.
It goes something like this:
The grower who cultivated my friends’ pot was from an old Hawaiian family. One of the Ali’i, the rulers, and had married pretty much along those lines so that he had claims to the line of chiefs. His mother told him how when she was a little girl, her very pregnant mother one day started screaming and ordered her to go get her father. She never forgot the puddle of strange smelling fluid between her mother’s legs. She ran like a reef dart down to the cane fields where her father was a foreman for one of the sugar bosses. He had a horse and they climbed aboard and galloped for their home. When they got there, the mother was passed out limp on the floor. Her belly was sunken. A bloody mess was splashed all around her legs and waist. And most eerie and strange, a slime trail leading out of the house shone in the morning sun sparkling. They awakened the woman. She screamed and bawled and they could get nothing sensible from her. She was weak and shaking and finally whispered, “My son has gone down to find his ohana.” At that moment, her auntie showed up so the pot grower’s mother and her father started to track the queer slime trail through the shrubs and grasses. It led through the ‘akoko to the strand and there on the black sand beach was a small shark flopping and flipping toward the shoreline. They ran toward it, still following the silvery trail that they had followed from their house. When they got to the baby shark it was exhausted, its dry gills working slowly in immediate distress. Her father picked up the shark and rushed it into the surf. He cradled it in his hands moving it through the water, spinning it in small circles until it regained its strength and skittered away. The pot grower’s grandfather watched a long time, waist deep in the gentle surf. He turned to come back when the little girl saw the terrifying dorsal fin of a great white roaring toward him from behind. The little girl screamed and pointed and the man turned around and saw what was coming and rather than run, turned to face it. She saw the treacherous beast open its mouth but stop before her father. After a moment the beast turned around and fled the reef toward the open ocean. Her father slogged forward and fell on his knees and offered a prayer to Heavenly Father for his wife’s deliverance, for the Melchizedek Priesthood, and that he was in the tribe of Manasseh, and of the sharks. Then he turned to the little girl, “You need never fear the sharks, your little brother will protect you. He is a shark and you are ohana.”
After the story, a strange feeling settled over the group. The waves near us crashing and sparkling white in the moonlight seemed pregnant with mythic power as if a shark could appear as we watched. The night on the other side seemed menacing and watchful. Crouching, ready to pounce.
Finally I whispered, “They were Mormon?”
He seemed surprised by my question and said, “Yeah, how did you like know that? Whoa. This is like creeping me out.”
“There was some Mormon stuff in the story you told.”
“Wicked strange. Are you a Mormon? Is that why you don’t do the doobie?”
“Yeah dude was a Mormon, but says he was like exorcized when he did time in Kulani prison for stealing cattle up on Parker Ranch lands. Slapped him harsh they did, but fact is he learned how to grow emjay when he was clearing land for the Hawaii DSS to make that arboretum north of Hilo Town.”
“Excommunicated.”
“Yeah, whatever, he was Xed out of existence.”
Judy weighed in, “Tell her about the nightwalkers.”
“Man … You don’t want to go there. That’s some wild ass shizz that was, like man I’m all creeped out even worse about that.”
“Creepy is as creepy does.”
“So like tell her anyway. I ain’t heard nothing like that. Tell her.”
“You tell her!”
“OK. I will. So he says this is true. He says he’s like seen it five or six times and he knows his brother died from them. He says his brother was no way old enough or drunk enough to like have a heart attack and they got him sure.”
“What happened?”
Mikey interrupts, “Nightwalkers got him!”
“Nightwalkers?”
Judy again, “Yeah, at night these armies of old time Hawaiians come marching through the streets all ghost and see-through like. You can hear them singing old Hawaiian songs and they come with their war clubs and all and if they find you awake they kill you with a blow from the clubs. It don’t leave no mark but you are dead nonetheless. Doctors will tell you it was a heart attack or a brain stroke or some such nonsense. At night you can hear them marching. He says the only thing you can do is drop down and pretend you are asleep.”
I could not suppress my smile, “Can’t you just hide under your blanket? Aren’t there rules about ghosts getting at you under a blanket?”
“This is real. Lots of people have seen them! Not just a few and in every case if they hadn’t pretended they were sawing logs it would have been the end. Believe or don’t but man you are a fool if you don’t. And if you don’t take this serious you’ll likely end up losing your other hand.”
“Mikey!”
Realizing what he just said, he slapped a hand over his mouth. Then said soberly (especially given how high he was), repentantly, “I am so sorry. I am. Really, really sorry. I didn’t mean no offense. It’s like the weed talking. I didn’t mean nothing. It’s just you can’t ignore the mysterious things of the world. There are stranger things than we know. But you know … crap … I’m really sorry.”
I wasn’t offended. I was tired of this conversation with a couple of flower children dosed up on wacky weed, however, and so decided to exit the scene.
“Look, no worries. But I’m tired and think I’ll go to bed. Thanks for dinner. That was very generous of you. Goodnight.”
I stood up. I felt sort of bad. They were both obviously in pain thinking they had offended me. And who knows maybe at some level I was. He was right. There are dangers in the world and taking ayahuasca and letting your hand fall in a fire is pretty foolish. But that’s not why I was leaving. I was tired of their youth and their sense that life was nothing more than chasing a more exquisite high. Worst of all, I was missing my solitary contemplations because of them.
As I was walking away I could hear Judy scolding Mickey, “You shithead! Why did you say that? We were having such a nice conversation. Man, you are really an asshole you know that?”
I couldn’t make out what he mumbled back.
In the morning, I went on a small sunrise hike to see if I could catch sight of some monk seals that I’d been told visited a little cove occasionally. When I got back I planned to make breakfast for my friends and apologize for my abrupt departure and let them know I had no hard feelings. They were gone. On my sleeping bag they had laid some wild flowers and a package of freeze dried chili. On a note they had written:
Namaste, We got up early to make a run for the road to get some supplies up mauka side then head north past Hilo and up the windward coast. It was groovy to get to know you a bit. I hope we did not offend or leave you with a downer about our stop in this quiet paradise. Should you ever find yourself in Boston please look us up and say hi. We leave these gifts that you might remember us more fondly than we deserve. Love is all you need, but we are still working on it.
Peace and Love,
Judy Hauptman and Mikey Singer
OK. That was sweet. Now I felt guilty. They were just exploring the world like I was and I had been anything but gracious. I’d done everything I could to drive them away—not helping them find water, leaving coolly after I’d been given a generous meal, ignoring them when they wanted to talk. The irony was running thick in the air around me. What did their arrival interrupt? My contemplation on love. What did I do? I drove them off. What did they leave me? Their love. Ouch.
So here I sit. The day has progressed and I feel glum. Disappointed in myself for treating the others so shabbily. I cannot bring myself to wish them back. I feel torn and disappointed that I drove them away and that they left. As if to reflect my mood clouds have gathered. Rain is rare here on the edge of the Kau Desert so I’m not over worried about a downpour, but the overcast sky and increasing wind seems to remind me of the guilt that I can’t seem to suppress.
I try to shake it off with a swim, but that backfires because the wind is whipping up the waves making it choppier than makes for good snorkeling. I start to climb out and cut my leg on a piece of coral and although the wound is not deep it stings in the salty water. I get back to camp and realize I’m out of water. Mostly because I didn’t pull some out of the little cave in the presence of the others. I didn’t want to give its location to the hippies, and so my misfortune starts to feel like a just punishment for bad behavior—So you want to reflect on love do you, why didn’t you start with the nice couple from Boston?
I pick up my apple cider jug and make an easy climb down the fifteen-foot drop into the cave and standing on a little ledge fill the bottle. I decide not to clean up my wound so near to the source of the spring, so I climb back out and scramble back to camp. I trip on a driftwood log the flower children left on the trail, apparently while dragging their benches over last night. I lose about half the water and find I’m limping slightly because in the fall, I may have twisted my ankle. I call them several names, then remember how I treated them. I’m frustrated with myself. I’m frustrated with them. I’m frustrated that I have been made to feel so lousy. I’m frustrated with the wind and the coral that cut my leg open. I’m angry the sun has disappeared.
I clean the wound and test my ankle for real damage. It’s already feeling better and I can walk on it, but worst-case scenarios start to run through my head: What if I get injured and can’t walk back to the car? No one knows where I am on the Big Island. What if … what if … what if.
I sit on my sleeping bag and fall on my back then turn over onto my side and start to cry. Why not? I’m feeling sorry for myself. I don’t even have a hand. I’ve lost badminton. I’ve lost two years of my life. I’ve lost everything I’ve ever valued. Has anyone been through this much? I can’t even go camping without it being ruined.
I fall into a heavy sleep and when I awake it is late afternoon. I’m groggy and thick headed. It was not a good nap. I stand up and walk away from my camp to use the bathroom. The Filipino man who gave away so many secrets about this place, warned me that the ghosts of the ancestors here are erratic and unpredictable, given to whims, and dangerous when not respected. He said that when I use the bathroom, that I should explain my need to the spirits of the place and apologize for despoiling the land and then to cover it all with soil. I think the notion that I should make such a fuss about taking a pee quaint, but I had followed his advice so far on this camp—making a game of thanking the ghosts for the use of their land. It did make me feel good—like I was tapping into something deep; recognizing the sacracy of the land. But this time I ignore the advice. I pee on the ground. I feel disappointed in myself and in response raise my middle finger to the landscape. How dare it make me feel like I owed it an apology for peeing! But the act feels like a transgression. I’ve breached something and the place doesn’t feel the same.
As I leave and start to walk back to camp, I catch something out of the corner of my eye, but when I turn toward it, nothing. It is strangely unnerving. The impression of motion was strong, but I don’t see so much as a bird. I think to myself, I know there is nothing to this, however if I ignore my fear, it will just keep pestering me. Better safe than sorry as they say. So I return and say, “Look ghosts, I had to pee. So sorry and all that.” The foreboding does not go away. I slept longer than I intended and I find that when I pulled out the water bottle and bandaged my leg I didn’t zip my knapsack back up and mongooses have pulled out some trail snacks and scattered them about.
I need more water, so I return to the cave for more. I have trouble carrying more than one canteen at a time with only the one hand, so I make two trips. I start the fire and go back to the large boulders and crags where the opihi are found. I climb up on the black volcanic rock and start to pry some of the little gastropods up. I’ve loaded up only a small number into my camp pan. I bend down, working on one when I glance back just in the nick of time and see a rogue wave bearing down on me. I scream and leap up the rock in a half jump, half spring, getting out of the way just in time for it to crash at my heels. If it had pulled me in, I would be lost. I’m shaking. I’ve lost my knife and pan both which I left behind when I fled the wave. I stare at the water crashing below me and I feel an anger and a presence from the ocean. It feels like it is reaching out for me, trying to find a way to pull me back to it. I force my rational mind to take control. I go over the facts at hand, spell out clearly the laws of the universe, and dismiss any intent on the part of inanimate objects. I start to settle down when I see a figure dart past a slit formed by two large rocks obscuring all but a small section of sandy shore. I’m filled with fear that pimples my skin and sends chills down my back. I climb a little higher and move off to the left about 100 meters, not the way I came in. I don’t know who is waiting for me. I get back on the shore and carefully approach the lagoon and my camp. I see no one. My fire is burning nicely. I look for footprints and don’t see anything obvious or new. It’s all as it should be. I scan the shoreline looking for who I might have seen back on the rocks. There is no one. I shout, “Hey. I see you! Come out of there.” Trying to trick whoever it is out of the shadows, but no one appears.
I return to my fire. I feel like I’m being watched and I keep turning round and looking up and down the beach, at the rocks, up to the Pali. But there is no one here. With my pan gone I cannot cook my noodles so I munch on them raw. It’s not as grim as it sounds, but I miss the warmth that the cooked food brings. And I miss the opihi.
“Gilda!” A low voice. Almost a bark.
I spin around again something moves out of the corner of my eye, but no one is there and there is nowhere they could have gone. I shout:
“Who’s there? Show yourself!”
But no one is there.
The sun is starting to set and I’m scared. Terrified. Malice surrounds me. My knife is gone so I look around for a weapon. I find a piece of driftwood with just the right shape for a club. I stoke the fire high and wait.
The sun has set and I’m watching the fire. I get up and walk around facing away from the flames and stare into the darkness waiting, watching. The fire pops and I jump. The sound of the waves and the wind masks any other sound. In the complexity of those reverberations of the wind through the rocks and palms and grasses and over the top of the waves one can hear multiple voices. And in the break of the surf channeled through the flutes and horns of a thousand crevasses and cracks, the symphony is complex and varied. I hear within it voices. I hear song. I hear the thromb of ancient drums and the chants of long dead warriors. I feel the curses of Kahuna and shamans. I hear the howl of ghosts. They all are proclaiming one thing: I do not belong here.
And then I see them coming from the Pali. Nightwalkers, moving white and insubstantial toward me from a great distance. I don’t know what to do and like a child I dive into my sleeping bag. My mockery of my friend’s story seems to be condemning me. I can hear the tattoo of their tramp and the refrain of their cadence call as they bellow their war chant and send it riding on the wind. Demonic ethers spill from their voices corrupting the landscape and poisoning the air. These baleful apparitions will offer no quarter to the embodied. I know that with certainty. I am breathing like a captured animal—my chest heaving, sweat soaking my shirt, I am trembling like a hypothermic ice bather. They will find my body mongoose-gnawed and cold. A prayer starts to form as I wonder how I will die. And I know I will die. There is a certainty that I am about to leave this world that is crystal clear and undeniable. It is not a belief, but a kind of knowledge. I am doomed.
I pause in my fear as a little thought surfaces. How will I die? How exactly will they kill me? How effective are their spectral weapons? Other than terror, what power have they? To my mind suddenly comes the message a biologist friend of mine wrote from a bed and breakfast he and his wife were staying in near Bar Harbor, Maine shortly before I left for Vietnam:
It appears this bed and breakfast is haunted. Last night as the crescent moon’s light breached our western window, a ghost materialized, passing in through the dressing table mirror. A great sea captain he appeared to be and when he saw my eyes fixed upon his visage he let out a terrible and otherworldly moan. But I smiled, and he, flummoxed at his impotence, let out another Jacob Marley-like wail. It seemed too textbook to me. Unoriginal and hackneyed. “Come,” I said reproachfully, “let’s have no more of these carnival ride shenanigans. I am a man of science. Tell me by what metaphysics you appear. Demonstrate by what chemistry, however strangely mercurial, you are structured.” So we spoke long into the night, but not of natural philosophy as I intended, for the conversation turned to the gray of the sea and the song of whales and the deeds of courage that pressed forward will one day tame the stars. We showed one another our scars won by honor and accident. And as the rosy-fingered dawn began to blank the eastern stars (laughing together at his reference to Homer, for there is ken shared between the living and the dead), and as the smell of bacon and coffee from the kitchens below wafted into the room, he bowed and doffed his hat and departed.
A creative work obviously but as I recall it, courage gathers and I stick my head out of my bag and challenge the nightwalkers: “Tell me by what metaphysics you appear! Demonstrate by what physics you are bound! I will have no more of your shenanigans. Name your power or fade away!”
And suddenly I start to laugh. The absurdity of my curled up in a shivering ball of jelly to avoid warrior ghosts hits me full force. I laugh and laugh. Now I am shaking in mirth. In sidesplitting laughter I fight my way out of the bedroll and face my demons. But they are gone. The sound of their march has become the knock of a piece of driftwood lodged in a narrow rock spillway of pulsing waves beating forward and rolling back dragging the log back and forth in this slotted trap. Their chant? The play of the wind among the palms and rocks. The wraiths revealed against the Pali? The moonlight drifting in and out of the thinning clouds.
A bit of beef. A blot of mustard. An underdone potato.
I am again surrounded by the soft light of the moon, which is now fully disclosed. The waves speak again of ancient things, processes at work for eons. I am bidden again to wonder and mystery, not of the type suggested by superstition, but that demanded by the deep occult of things existent.
It is time to look at love. I am no longer afraid. I pull the book I want to explore from my pack. It will serve as the basis of my investigation and the moon will light it. The book deserves a book-length treatment of its origins in full but I’ll sketch it only briefly.
In the summer of ‘58, I was at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill teaching badminton to young girls in several sports camps being run by the PE department. It was to last over the course of the summer. During my time there I decided to sign up for a graduate course in writing poetry. The class itself was a waste of time (the teacher was a model of affectation and theatrics and the students were more inclined to snicker at his poetic recitations than be moved by them). The students, however, formed a cadre of fellows that made the summer delightful. There were students from multiple disciplines like the biologist who gave me the ‘haunted inn’ piece above, historians, students in English, and some from religion. I will not name them (there was one whose name you would recognize if you’ve followed American poetry). Quite the band of merry bards were we.
Often, we would gather at a pub on Franklin Street to read to each other our best work—not like in class. There we would read our throwaway poems because the teacher, no matter what a poem’s worth, would listen to a student’s poem with his eyes closed, his fingers folded together and his index fingers buried into the bridge of his nose. He graced his face with a look of rapture. It became a game among the students to read in class their most devilishly awful and hackneyed doggerel and listen with an undisclosed smirk as he praised it to the moon. The real game was to suppress your giggles as he extolled the virtues of every poem. But in the pub we were a master’s class at the height of our craft. Our best work was put forth and received honest and often brutal critiques.
One of the students from the religion department was a strange and ethereal girl. Her skin was translucent, almost an Alice blue. She had a sharp, delicate face with round (more than generous) ears that could not be kept contained within her thin straight hair. I’m not sure I ever knew her real name. We called her MT (em tee), from the initials, Mus timidus, a nickname that she seemed to enjoy as a mark of acceptance. She was pathologically shy. She rarely shared her poetry and she never offered critique or advice to anyone. When she did share an offering, it was always stunningly complex. She used technically challenging forms with such beauty and grace and insight that offering advice seemed silly (although we tried and which she took with appreciation). She read, and even spoke, multiple medieval languages. She was unique, weird, wonderful, and quiet.
She was always there. She seemed to follow us around like a puppy. When we would slide from pub to pub to put down a few beers, she would order one but take only a sip or two from each, leaving a string of unfinished drinks. When we ordered a pizza or fish and chips she would nibble on a little but not touch much. If you wrote down everything she said over the course of the summer it would have amounted to only a page or two of text. We all liked her and encouraged her to interact, but she would just hide her smile behind her hand and mumble something we rarely caught. Her teeth were strangely misaligned and we speculated how this might have affected her self-confidence.
At the end of the summer we were devastated to find out after she missed several of our outings that she was in the hospital. She was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer on the right side of her heart. Given its location, the doctors said there was nothing they could do and she would likely not last more than a few weeks. The truth was from the time she was admitted until the time she died was only ten days. When we finally heard about her being in the hospital we came immediately, but it was on the seventh day since her admittance. She was optimistic and seemed not to be as sick as the doctors were saying. She was clear-headed and animated.
We visited together as a group and joked with her for about an hour after which her mother, who had come from Vermont, said maybe we should let her get some rest. As we were leaving, MT called me back and asked if we could talk alone for a minute. I said yes, of course. When the door closed after the group had been herded out by her mother, she reached into a bag and brought out a small present wrapped in brittle white tissue paper swathed liberally with a braided red twine. She handed it to me with liturgical solemnity, deliberately, carefully as if it were rare and precious.
“I made this for you.”
I moved to open it, but she stopped me and said, “Later. OK? Your birthday is in a month. Right? Save it for that.”
I knew what she was saying: Wait until I die.
I started to cry. I wasn’t close to this girl. I knew little enough about her, but I was quite overcome and touched by her gesture. This was our first conversation alone in all the time I’d known her. She reached out and took my hand and patted it softly, then kissed it. She leaned back on her bed and closed her eyes, resting. I kissed her on the forehead and thanked her again for the gift. She opened her eyes and smiled, “Thank you,” she whispered.
I moved toward the door and she suddenly struggled into a sitting position and said, “Please come back soon.” I said I would and stepped out of the door. Her mother smiled at me and thanked me for coming and went back into the room. I never saw her again. This was on Thursday. We’d planned to come back on Saturday. She died in the early morning hours on that day.
Her body was sent back to Vermont so we could not even attend her funeral. During the two weeks that remained of the summer, at every gathering the group would order one extra beer, which we would leave untouched—as she would have. A memorial to MT. Our friend.
I’ve come out to the promontory to read under the moonlight. In my hand is one of my few treasures. The book MT made. When she said she made it for me, she meant ‘made’ literally. It was fashioned from soft dyed red leather inlaid with a delicate etched Celtic frame, tooled to enclose a hand-painted medieval illuminated panel showing a unicorn bleeding and a weeping maiden holding the beast’s head to her bosom. The pages were made of home-brewed birch bark paper and polished to a high sheen, sewn together and glued carefully into the binding. A rice paper page cover protects an original artwork of flowers and vines creating the title page: The Book of Gilda Trillim. In it are original translations from Old French, Latin, and several English and German variants of medieval women mystics. In lovely calligraphy, they are written in inks of red, gold, blue, and black. The preface on the first page is taken from the opening frontispiece of the Beguine heretic Marguerite Porete’s book, The Mirror of Simple Souls, for which she was burned at the stake:
You who would read this book,
If you truly wish to seize it,
Think about what you say,
For it is very tricky to comprehend;
Humility, the keeper of the assets of
Knowledge
And the mother of the other Virtues,
Must overtake you.3
Every entry in the book is about the mystery of love. Sometimes it is personified as a being, and others as the mysterious force of God. In every entry there is something about how the women immersed themselves as in a flaming fire that consumed them. The entries are ecstatic and overflowing with passion or longing or exhortation to love. The last piece in the book is a heartbreaking stanza from the Beguine poet Hadewijch’s the Subjugation to Love:
And I am now forsaken,
By all creatures alive:
This is clearly evident.
If in love
I cannot triumph,
What will become of me?
I am small now; then I would be nothing.
I am disconsolate unless Love furnishes a cure.
I see no deliverance; she must give me
Enough to live on freely.4
The last page is inscribed, “With love your mus timidus.”
It seems strange to me that all this love was masked from me. Love that would create such work of art as this. Yet to me at the time, she was just an odd little friend who joined us on a summer’s adventure. Were it not for her memorable death and this book, I likely would have altogether forgotten her. She would become a creature of memory, one of those bygone souls who withdraws into the fogs of the past, just part of an atmosphere that provides mood to recollection but cannot be brought up explicitly except as a shadow. Someone who when called to mind by a friend or acquaintance by, “Do you remember that odd mousy girl who was in our poetry class?” you might answer, “Kind of. Was she the one with the enormous ears?” “Yes, that’s the one. I wonder what ever happened to her?” But all her depth of feeling, her passions, her immeasurable worth and value are masked and lost in the shrouds and mists of a moment passing. Oh, how I wish I could go back and meet her. To know the person this book reveals.
Let me assess. I’ve tried to discover the depth of things, to find the place in which ‘isness’ hides in apple seeds. I’ve explored the connections that make a thing coalesce into a thing. An object. I’ve wandered through much and after all, end knowing nothing. I don’t know what I am. I don’t understand what anything is. On my vision quest, I was told that love was the one thing that mattered. Why? Isn’t it, as the scientists are claiming, just a brain bathed in certain hormones? A certain tone added to the music of life? Are we not apish machines that click and clack in a mockery of a stopgap motion movie monster over Tokyo? Am I just the spinning of soggy gears and meaty levers? I cannot even come to know myself? When I am asleep my body does things I neither control nor react to, so what do I know?
And yet here I am watching waves cascade one after another in steady regularity tamed by the moon. But the moon does more than draw the white breakers from the ocean: it floods them with light reflected from the sun. It combines with coral reefs, which break and complexify the water into a foamy, roiling turbulence that adds texture to the combination, which, when added to me and my neural tangles, creates in this universe a sense of beauty. A moment of awe. That is something. Not an object. Not a structure although it is conditioned by that matrix. But this beauty? It is more than these elements. It is something that sneaks up from deep evolutionary time, combines with an occasion called now, trysts with matter, dances with consciousness, and into what? Something above all this. An abundance. An overflowing that stretches upward and outward. A grace?
Then Love? I look at the book in my lap. Its beauty exceeds the moonlit play of elements below me. It was born of love. Love known by Christian mystics, drawn to something beyond. And that love flows forward in wave-like ripples that ride the ocean of humanity until it crashes into a young poet and artist who then evaporates into nothingness? But not before she creates a current that pulls me like a riptide into the depths of love and memory. Did those mystics learn it from the Galilean? And his love’s origins? Was he the source or does it begin before him? When did love enter the world? What slime-emergent creature first felt its tremblings or even the nascent motions or the first intimations of this thing we call love?
So here I sit. A moment. A moment bathed in light and created by moon, ocean waves, and lava from deep in the depths of the earth. And from a book born of an unrealized love who brought to life fellow travelers from the middle ages, who in turn worshiped a carpenter, who defied an empire by bowing to it, and all blending with a woman who was given a glimpse of creation, or of her mind’s conception thereof (is there a difference?), a woman who loved rats and from that love midwifed an emerging music new in the world from sources similar to what her own race must have once passed through. What am I? This moment? This strange blend of past and present, of history and emergent consciousness. Beauty? Love? In me? Overflowing me? Creating me? Defining me?
I pause.
This is where the fragment of a journal entry ends. With ‘I pause.’ We don’t know how this would have ended. The book from MT has never been found. Years later she laments a lost treasure in a letter to Babs Lake and most scholars believe that that treasure may have been this book.