At seven-thirty in the morning, I sat up straight in bed, stricken by a wave of anxiety.  I was on the Big Island of Hawaii and my money was running out.  I had enough to last me for a few months if I headed to some place less expensive, like Central America, but here it was nearly fifty dollars a night, just for a bunkbed, and I wasn’t making the connections I’d hoped to, but when had I?  The world was full of extroverts, running around crashing each other’s parties, and I’d always been a spectator.

I looked into what it would take to rent a car for a few days, but since the pandemic rental prices had been through the roof.  That wasn’t going to be an option on this trip.  Then I looked into hostels in Kona and booked a room for four days.  I would take a bus there when the time came.

Going out into the lobby, I sat and talked to a woman, Jolene, a friend of Joe’s, originally from Washington state, who’d been living in a tent in Puna for a year and getting around on bike.  I was looking for something inexpensive, but had also been living in a pop-up camper for two years and wasn’t interested in going anymore primitive than that.  She mentioned the rental rooms downstairs, but I already knew about them and knew there was no vacancy.  If there were any openings I would’ve moved in that afternoon.

Jolene was a latter-day hippie, my kind of people.  I’d crossed swords with that tribe in the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, Northern California, in my travels through Latin America and Southeast Asia.  We were all looking for a simple life that didn’t really exist in America anymore.  Some of the last great opportunities had been for my parents’ generation, the baby boomers. 

Ever since I’d been out on my own, I’d encountered a society that was deficient when it came to basic trust issues.  Everything was overpriced.  Everything required a security deposit.  When it came to finding a job, you needed a resume for every position.  It was a country of strangers competing against each other.  The blood of life had been strangled dry through multiple rules and regulations.  There were few places to even park a car for a few hours without getting a ticket.  As an aspiring free-bird I’d been terrorized in my twenties, hopping from place to place, always worried sick about money.

On this day I needed to go for a hike.  There were two waterfalls I knew about that were in close proximity.  I’d been to Akaka Falls the last time I was in Hilo, a four-hundred-foot drop with a wooden walkway.  It might be one of the most scenic falls in the world, but was also over ten miles away.  Rainbow Falls was closer.  It is eighty feet and wonderful in its own way, especially when the conditions are right and rainbows appear above the basin.  It was not hard to walk there, so I strapped my ukelele to my back and set off.

It had been raining the whole time I’d been in Hilo.  Even though the rain had tapered off, the road was wet and thick mud stuck to the bottom of my shoes.  There was a road crew, men in green vests, that was ripping up sections of the road at the same time, creating a real quagmire. 

When I got to the falls there was an enormous volume of water gushing over the edge, but it was as brown as the mud that was sticking to my feet.  The stairs to the top section were closed off and a sign warned about the danger of flash floods.  Even though there was yellow tape sectioning off the forest, I still waded into the trees, thinking I’d stick to my original idea and play my uke beside the falls.  It was a dismal reality, sitting beneath gray skies, the falls roaring like a beast in the background.

Eventually, I started back towards town and found a spot along the Wailuku River, just past the Puueo Bridge.  The strings on my ukelele seemed too loose on this day, and made a tuneless buzzing sound.  I looked into the cloudy water and saw a sea turtle that was tumbling end over end.  That is how I felt, disoriented, lonely, confused. 

The town was full of homeless folks.  My ex-roommate at the hostel was now one of them.  I longed to have a place to unpack my bag and structure enough to keep me engaged and connected with a community.  Instead, I tumbled from place to place like the sea turtle, just fighting to keep afloat.