Lono is the god of clouds and storms.  His signs are thunder, lightning, earthquake, rain, rainbows, and the wind.  He may be related to a Tahitian god that was considered to be the messenger of the gods.  The high priests prayed to Lono for rain and the protection of the crops, as well as good health.

Lono figured prominently in the Makahiki festival, which was held during the rainy season each year, from October to February.  During this time the tapu regulations were relaxed and athletic contests were held.  Father Lono, or the Long God, was created from a straight wooden pole, ten inches around and ten to fifteen feet long.  At the top was the figure of a bird and a crosspiece that was adorned with white streamers.  It was then carried around the coast in a clockwise direction, and required up to twenty days to make the circuit.  At each village they came to, the carriers were fed and the chief attached an ivory tooth ornament to the pole.

The return of Lono marked a time of celebration, hula dancing, singing, feasting, surfing, and wrestling.  Riddles were also told as a way of challenging the mind.  In the legend of Lono, he falls in love with a beautiful maiden who becomes a goddess.  She then makes love to a chief and he beats her to death.  Overcome with remorse, he makes his mad journey around the island, challenging every man he meets to a wrestling match.  He then builds the largest canoe that has ever been seen and sails off alone.  He promises that he will return, not in a boat, but on a floating island.

This ancient prophecy led to some confusion when Captain James Cook arrived in Hawaii during the Makahiki season of 1778.  No one had ever seen a white man, or the size of the ship he showed up in, so many took it to be the return of Lono, and he was feted accordingly.  When he left and then returned, however, the festival season was over and the magic spell was broken.  At one point the natives stole one of his lifeboats.  In retaliation, Cook attempted to take one of their chiefs hostage.  A struggle broke out and he was killed.

It was Super Bowl Sunday.  The game was starting around one o’clock, but the television wasn’t working in the hostel.  I went out that morning, scouting for some place to watch it.  All of the bars and restaurants were charging expensive covers to get in.  Although I wasn’t a huge Rams fan, they were the closest team I had to root for and I’d been following the playoffs up until then. 

The closest bar to the hostel was Minnie’s.  There was a sign in front of the back steps, telling people to go around to the other side.  I snuck up them and then got in the back door when someone stepped out for a smoke.  The place was packed and everyone who’d gone in the front were wearing wrist bands.  I lurked around the bathrooms with my arms crossed for the entire game, from the National Anthem to the closing drive.

The Rams were playing the Bengals.  All year they’d been playing well, building up a lead, and then letting it erode away.  In the second quarter they were winning by ten, but by the third they were losing by a touchdown.  There were some Bengals fans that were very loud and happy about this.  I wanted to go over and knock them out, but didn’t want to be discovered and evicted, right at the end of the game.  Good thing I kept my composure.  The Rams came back to win with a minute left, even though it was largely due to penalties, which always feels like a cheap way to go out.  Still, a win was a win.

After the game, I fetched my ukelele and went to sit on a sea wall in Kapiolani Park, playing until the sun went down.  It felt like I’d always been playing there, and always would be.  Right before it set the sun got enormous, just a blazing white hole that seemed capable of incinerating the planet.  Then it began to shrink and grow gold.  The waves carried that golden light towards where I sat and cast it on the sand beneath me.  Things had been difficult.  My situation was desperate.  In that moment, though, everything was calm.  My fingers knew the right notes to play.

In the morning, I lay in bed later than usual.  I felt the bed shaking and knew that Jerry was climbing down from his perch.  There was a couple that were just moving into the room.  It was their first time in Hawaii, and they were on their way to pick up a rental car.  Jerry started giving them advice on places to visit, and soon I heard him volunteering to come with them and drive the car for them, since he knew his way around Oahu.  This led to an incredibly long pause and then a series of stammering thank yous and apologies, as they struggled to come up with excuses for why that wouldn’t work.

My plan was to visit the Bishop Museum, but first I needed to read another chapter about Hawaiian mythology.  No one was using the hammocks in the kitchen, so I sat down and got busy.  When American missionaries first came to Hawaii in 1820, they found that Kane, the god of procreation and the ancestor of the chiefs, was the leading god.  He, in conjunction with Ku and Lono, founded the three worlds, the upper heaven of the gods, the lower heaven of earth, and then earth itself, as a garden for men.

The story of creation is very similar to the one in the Bible, probably due to the influence of the missionaries over time.  First, there is only darkness, no heaven or earth.  Then the three gods create light and fashion the earth and everything in it.  Next, they create man and woman.  Finally, man breaks the law.  Kane goes to heaven alone and people stay on the earth.

An altar to Kane is usually a single conical stone, often in the shape of a phallus.  It may be one to eight feet high and is usually surrounded by ti plants.  Here families came to pray to their aumakua, or family god, praying for forgiveness and protection.  The stone would often be covered with a bark cloth and sprinkled with coconut oil.

Prayers were offered as chants.  A scaffolding and three stages were erected at the temple, or heiau.  The three stages were meant to represent the earth, the heavens, and some far-off place.  Only the high priest and chief had access to this highest of stages.  The whole structure was covered with a white cloth and prayers were offered at each step going up.

Like Ku, there are a host of lesser gods that share the name of Kane.  Kane-i-ke-ao would be Kane of the dawn.  Kane-i-ka-ua would be Kane of the rain.  There is Kane of the whirlwind, Kane of the rainbow, Kane of the cloud above, Kane of the heavenly star, different Kanes for different clouds, different stars, different elements, and situations.  God was in everything to the Hawaiian people.

The Bishop Museum was founded in 1889 and has the largest collection of Polynesian artifacts in the world.  To get there, I first went to the ABC store and bought a five-dollar bus pass.  Then I walked up to Kuhio Avenue and took the number 2 bus, across the Ala Wai Canal and over to downtown, turning left on King Street.  We passed Iolani Palace and the Hawaii State Capitol, then voyaged through China Town.  From Liliha Street we took a left on North School Street, and soon after arrived at the museum.

Although there is also a Science Center and a Planetarium on the grounds, my interest was mostly in mythology and history, so I headed for the Hawaiian Hall.  The three floors here are divided in a similar way to native cosmology, with the first floor, Kai Akea, representing Hawaiian gods, legends, and beliefs, the second, Woa Kanaka, being the realm where people live and work, and the third, Wao Lani, reserved for history. 

I went around to the exhibits and read up on Kane, the life giver, Ku, the protector, Lono, the people’s god, and Kanaloa, the god of the sea.  The representations of the gods went beyond the typical tikis.  There were black dolls with wide-eyes in loin cloths, stone heads like those of Easter Island, erect phalluses, rough wooden masks, long poles, intricate carvings of family guardians, goddesses with pointed breasts.  In the center of the room was a grass house with gourds out front.  There was a model of a temple and a large great white shark, suspended by strings. 

On the next floors were exhibits on folk healing, hula, and melee, or songs.  There was a guitar that had belonged to Liliuokalani, the last Hawaiian monarch and composer of Aloha Oe.  There were also the red and yellow feathered cloaks and hats that had been worn by royalty, and in the Kahili Room, the feather staffs of the royal family accompanied by oil paintings of the nobles in the Kamehameha family tree. 

To be a Hawaiian back in the day, meant knowing what class you were assigned to and what was expected of you.  It was a far cry from my situation, not knowing where I belonged or what to do next.  On the bus on the way back to the hostel, I was behind some old drifter, who sat with his head collapsed in his hands as we whisked past chain-link fences and trash. 

Outside of a gas station, beneath two coconut trees, was an enormous homeless residence, a plastic structure stretched over an abandoned mattress, two shopping carts and a baby stroller, loaded with junk outside.  On the corner was another makeshift structure, cardboard, and tarp, one shopping cart, two bicycles locked to a fence.  A woman lay on a cardboard box.  A man sat hunched over at the bus stop, with a jacket over his head and his belonging sprawled on the sidewalk in front of him.

Even though I was born in Honolulu and moved to Southern California at the end of high school, I did most of my schooling in the Midwest so never learned to surf.  My father body surfed in Hawaii, so I did that, and both my brothers grew up surfing, so sometimes they’d drag me along, but I didn’t start hitting the waves with any consistency until I was grounded in Huntington Beach during the pandemic, already in my fifties.  That’s a shame, because I probably could’ve gotten pretty good if I’d started earlier.  As it goes, I miss more waves than I catch.

The hostel I was staying at had longboards for rent.  I’d been caught up playing ukelele and studying mythology, but was leaving for the Big Island the next day and couldn’t move on without paddling out at Waikiki even once.  I grabbed a ten-foot board and walked down to the Waikiki Wall where it wasn’t very crowded.  The break on the left side of the wall is called Publics.  It was a long paddle to get out there and there were some areas where the reef jutted above the surface of the water.  What made it more dangerous was that it was predominantly locals surfing out there and I didn’t want to get in their way.

Looking down into the water as I paddled, I could see a movement of tropical fish flickering in the sunlight.  The fourth god of the Big Four when it comes to the Hawaiian Tiki gods is Kanaloa, the god of the sea.  Kane and Kanaloa are often mentioned in the same breath.  They complete each other.  Kanaloa is often depicted as being the Devil to Kane’s God.  Kanaloa leads a band of rebellious spirits who are cast out of heaven to rule the underworld.  Both Kane and Kanaloa make the figure of a man.  Kane’s lives.  Kanaloa’s remains stone.  He becomes jealous and seduces the wife of the first man, cursing them both to die, similar overtones, once again, to the origins story of the Bible.

Kane is stocky, with dark, curly hair, and Kanaloa is taller and pale.  They are both awa drinkers and water finders, who came traveling on the surface of the sea, causing plants to grow.  Awa, or kava, is their main food and they must find water to mix it with.  The Awa-iku are good spirits that ward off evil and help to manage the wind and the rain.  Kane and Kanaloa roam across the land, finding springs of clean water and opening fish ponds.

Now I was in the domain of Kanaloa, the evil-smelling squid, looking down at the underworld that is the sea.  I would need protection, that was for sure, as some of the jagged coral tops were sharp enough to cut paper with.  The waves were not big, two to three feet tops, and they broke in a gentle manner, but I had problems judging them when I got out there, either paddling too early or too late to be in the sweet spot when they broke.

There was a French girl working at the hostel that I shared a room with.  She stayed on the other side of the lockers and had constructed a canopy out of a bottom bunk.  We’d talked just a little, not enough that she would know me in the water.  A few local guys were giving her tips and all of them were getting a lot of rides.  No one was overly hostile when I came paddling out, but they didn’t go out of their way to welcome me either.  I drifted into a spot that was hardly breaking, and just got to my feet a few times.  Finally, a larger set came in and I went left on the first wave.  I went skimming over the surface of the sea, the reef only a few inches below.  When I wiped out, I was lucky not to be cut to shreds.  That was as good as the day would get.

That night the guy keeping the PBR twelve pack in his locker, the one who’d been taking pictures at the top of Diamond Head, staked a claim on a bed at the foot of mine.  He took off his shoes and the room immediately reeked.  Meanwhile, Jerry was up in his bed, sunk into his mattress like a flounder buried in the sand. 

If Kane, Ku, and Lono were a triumvirate to be reckoned with, we were one to be avoided, three old men with nothing better to do once it got dark than go to bed.  It hadn’t always been this way.  Once I’d been a great consumer of awa and romancer of women, waking up in a new bed every morning.  Now I clung to my rented bunk, like my life depended on it.  Time humbles all of us, some more than others.

In Hawaiian mythology, the gods Kane and Kanaloa are seen as living in the bodies of men in an earthly paradise, something like a floating land of clouds, where they drink awa and live off the fruits of a garden that never fails.  This paradise is often thought to be located on one of twelve sacred islands that have been lost or are hidden.  They may lie under the sea and can often be seen on the horizon at sunset or sunrise.  Here, the two gods live with other spirits, in a world that neither knows labor nor death.  In extreme old age they return to earth in the bodies of men.

There are some who believe that the Big Island may still retain a few vestiges of this ancient aloha, that there is something still unconquered about it that may allow a few spirits to roam free.  I am not convinced that any such place still exists in America, but in my travels across the states and to Hawaii, there was something exotic and secretive about the rainy side of the Big Island, Hilo, in particular, that continued to warrant investigation. 

After a few disastrous outings on Oahu, I’d made a hangout of Hilo the last few times I’d been in Hawaii, and wondered about setting up a base there.  On the morning of my flight, I called an Uber and went out to stood on Lemon Road with my things, about the same time as the other travelers were beginning to start their day.  I didn’t see the old evangelist, Jerry, but it looked like he was packed up, ready to head back to Ohio.  How many souls had been saved on his watch?  At least he didn’t get beat up this time around.  Not that I knew of.

The Uber driver who picked me up confused me for a local.  That didn’t hurt my feelings, although there is a world of difference between being born on the islands and brought up on them.  I was looking for a place that didn’t exist, the lost island of the gods.  Memories of my distant childhood had gotten mixed into my escapist fantasies.  No place on earth could measure up to the ideal, so I’d been moving around for years.  Oahu hadn’t been great, so now it was off to Hilo, and if that didn’t work out, then Guatemala.  Where would it end?

On previous flights to the Big Island, I’d sat by the window and seen the heads of the twin volcanos, Mauna Kea, and Mauna Loa, breaking through the clouds, like Kane and Kanaloa, or islands in a turning gray sea.  This time, however, I was in an aisle seat in the last row, looking at nothing but the back of the seat in front of me and a sarcastic companion next to me who spent the whole flight complaining about a guy who’d passed off one of his check-in bags as a carry-on, then held us all up for a few minutes as he struggled to stash it.  That was some real kook behavior, in his estimation.

The Hilo International Airport is a downhome transit hub.  When we arrived there and had walked from the tarmac to the terminal, there was no one working at the information counter and no taxis out front.  I went to wait for a bus that would possibly be arriving sometime in the next hour, before deciding to go with an Uber.  The driver had been living in Hilo for a dozen years and wasn’t a fan of all the rain, although it was always possible to drive to the other side of the island if you needed a respite.

Just then, as if to illustrate the driver’s point, it started to pour rain.  He drove me into town and pulled up in front of the Downtowner, where I leapt out with my bags.  I’d stayed there three or four times in the past and felt comfortable there.  On this occasion, there was new ownership and staff members, but the layout was essentially the same.  A hippie kid named Seth checked me in, while the other employee, Joe, was doing laundry.  They had a lower bunk reserved for me in a room with two bunks, but a rollaway had also been setup right next to my bed.

After moving in, I took my umbrella and went out walking in the rain.  Hilo feels like a town, with all the historic buildings from the early 1900s, and that’s what I like about it.  I made my way down Keawe Street, past the Big Head Tavern, then cut over to Haili Street and the Palace Theater, before turning right onto Kamehameha Avenue.  This is the main tourist strip with a majority of the gift shops and boutiques.  The windows reflect the sky, coconut trees, and ocean across the street, and there was a small army of homeless folks sitting in the doorways, staying out of the rain.  Two of them had made a fortress of umbrellas and seemed to be living inside it.

I walked along the Russel Carrol Park until I got to a Shell Station where I bought a bag of trail mix and a can of Monster Energy Drink.  While I was fumbling with my umbrella, I set the drink on a newspaper stand, only to have it roll off and fall to the ground where it punctured and began to spin like a rabid sprinkler.  I had to grab it and shotgun it while there was still anything left in the can.

It was a wet and lonesome day to just show up.  What I was looking for exactly, I wasn’t sure, possibly someone with a sign, welcoming me to town.  Instead, I was just another transient.  At least I had a bed to lie down in.  A lot of folks would be sleeping in the rain that night.

It rained hard and the wind blew all night long.  The two younger guys who were sharing the dorm room with me had gone out drinking together.  One of them passed out right away, but the one in the bunk above me spent a few hours loitering around the bathroom, brushing his teeth.  I got up to use the bathroom and he was brushing his teeth.  I got up a few hours later, and he was leaning against the mirror with his eyes closed, still brushing his teeth. 

That morning I got up early and went out to drink coffee in the main room.  Seth and Joe were sitting there, the two of them switching off shifts, working every day of the week.  A Samoan woman who seemed to be living in the hostel was eating a bowl of oatmeal.  I went down the backstairs to where there were a few smaller rooms that could be rented by the month.  If there were any vacancies, I would’ve moved right in. 

One guy who was cooking at a restaurant came out and started talking to me.  He said that the first time he ever tried surfing he got tubed.  He might’ve meant he got rolled over and over by the waves.  That was a possibility.  Then he added that the first time he ever went golfing, he got a hole in one.  Now I knew what I was dealing with.  Perhaps, he’d started on the practice putting green.

I took my ukelele and walked towards the sea.  The rain had let up but the clouds were black and turbulent overhead.  There was a black sand beach with a homeless encampment surrounding a small lighthouse.  One picnic table was open but when I went over and sat down on it, it felt like I was squatting in someone’s yard.  A woman came out of a tent and started showering about fifteen feet away from me in all of her clothes.  I kept my eyes fixed on the choppy water and churned out a rhythm on my ukelele.  This is why I’d come to Hawaii, to sit and play my father’s old ukelele to the spirits, to try to fill up the instrument, and subsequently my life, with positive mana energy. 

Just north of me the Wailuku River ran into the ocean.  Next to it some people were loitering around.  It was hard to say what drugs were responsible for the scourge of hard-bitten homelessness that I’d already witnessed in my travels across the States.  Meth?  Opioids?  Heroin?  Probably all of those and more. 

It hadn’t been that bad when I’d been growing up.  Kids had started drinking in junior high and high school, and when we moved to California, I found out about weed, but I didn’t know anyone that died of drug addiction.  Now people were dropping left and right, and the aggressive, schizophrenic, behavior the new drugs were causing was upsetting to see.  They are the modern-day demons that are possessing the nation.  The country is warring against itself, preying on the vulnerabilities of its weakest citizens.

I followed the Belt Line Road around Hilo Bay, sometimes stopping on a stretch of wall to work out a new song I’d started in Waikiki.  Being in Hawaii as dispossessed as I was made me frantic with anxiety, and the only place to put that energy was into my instrument.  I was temporarily able to find solace from my troubles as my mind struggled to put the right words in the right order.

Eventually, I came to the Liluokalani Gardens, which I visit every time I’m in Hilo.  It is the largest Japanese ornamental garden, built in 1917 to honor the immigrants who worked in the sugar cane fields.  On this day, there were large puddles on the footpath, and the bridge to the teahouse was inaccessible, but I wandered past the fishponds, through the rock gardens and around the stone lanterns.  Two little yellow birds, saffron finches, hopped along the trail ahead of me.  Pinpricks of rain began to poke at the pond.

Continuing on, I made my way across the footbridge to Coconut Island, or Moku Ola, or healing island, which once house an enormous heiau, or temple.  The legend is that anyone who swam around the island would be cured of any illness or bad feeling.  If that were true, I’d have to swim around the island a dozen times.  My afflictions and insecurities that day seemed too numerous to count.

In addition to the four primary gods; Ku, Lono, Kane, and Kanaloa, the Hawaiians believed in whole pantheons of lesser gods.  There were the four gods, the four thousand gods, the forty thousand gods, and so on, and so on.  Martha Beckwith makes an analogy to a tree, the trunk of the tree, the branches, the twigs, the leaves, the cells within the leaves.  There were the primary gods that made the heavens and earth, and then a numberless body of spirits, the spirits of the air, or uhane lewa, and the spirits of the dead, which have become aumakua, or guardian spirits, for their relatives on earth.

Every physical form on the planet is seen as a manifestation of spiritual forces.  Since every object has a spirit that may either do harm or be of help, every object is to be worshipped.  Each object or animal has a guardian spirit, which is something of an archetype for that variety of being.  The rocks are gods, the birds are gods, the rainbows are gods, every natural force and phenomenon contains some trace of divinity.  In short, all creation is sacred.

There is a diving tower on Coconut Island that was built for sailors to practice their dives.  One of the launching pads is from ten feet and the other is from twenty.  On this blustery day, I climbed to the top and sat dangling my legs over the edge, playing my ukelele songs to the sea, to the banyan trees, to the dark clouds, to the flowers, to fish, to the stone lanterns in the Japanese garden, until a family of tourists showed up who weren’t there to hear a concert.  They were there to visit the tower.

It was too stormy for anyone to jump in the water or swim around the island, but I knew the kids wouldn’t be satisfied if they didn’t get a chance to scramble up, so I ceded my position and began walking back towards Hilo.  On the way I stopped for a plate lunch at a fish market, and as soon as I sat down to eat my loco moco, it started to rain, as hard as it is capable of raining, anywhere, at any time.   I continued to have small luck, luck that I didn’t get poured on, luck that I got the lower bunk at the hostel, luck that I should be in Hawaii at all, not big luck, like having enough money or getting someone to cover my songs.

As soon as I finished eating, it stopped raining.  I walked across the highway to the park at Waiakea Pond.  The buildings and houses that had once been built on the land had been wiped out by a tsunami in 1960, so they’d created the park, with a few whimsical rolling bridges.  As hard as it had been raining, it was now that calm.  I walked over one bridge, like I was moving through a dream land, and saw the heavy blue and grey clouds reflected in the green water. 

It was not far from there to the statue of King Kamehameha, the first conqueror and ruler of the Kingdom of Hawaii.  Hilo had been an important place to him, his first official capitol after unifying the Hawaiian Islands and also where he built his fleet of war canoes.  The statue is fourteen feet tall.  Kamehameha wears a gold helmet and robe and clutches a spear in his left hand.  His right hand is reaching out in front of him.  There were offerings in front of him, leis, shells, gourds, flowers in vases. 

Walking back along the beach I came across a homeless encampment, where someone had pushed a shopping cart out onto the black sand.  They’d cleared a space to sleep in, in a confinement as narrow as a coffin, and had a tarp to pull over them.  It was only early afternoon and the black clouds were rolling in again.  I hurried back to the park close to the hostel where I’d started from. 

There I noticed I sign warning that a shark had recently been spotted in the water.  It also said no camping.  It was hard to call what the people on the beach were doing camping.  The danger they were in didn’t come from any shark.