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.

Sorcery is using spirits to gain power over people or situations.  It played a central role in the lives and dynamics of the Native Hawaiians.  When Kamehameha was consolidating his power in the islands it was important that he secured all the sorcery gods that were worshipped by the ruling chiefs and set up god houses and keepers for them. 

Sorcery was practiced through a fetcher, which was an image that was thought to be possessed by the spirit of an ancestor or some force of nature.  The bones of a dead family member might be used in the same way.  The goal was to bring the energy of the god to the keeper of the talisman.  A body might be dedicated to a god or animal and then take on that shape.  It would then go on to serve as an aumakua, or protective guardian, to the family.  An aumakua would punish the enemies of the family it served and bring good things to them, but they also had to remember not to neglect its worship or it might rain vengeance upon them.

Spirits could also inhabit a living person.  When this happened, the person was referred to as an akua noho, or sitting god, and was treated as a god during the time of their possession.  When the spirit was sent out to inflict injury on others that’s when the sorcery began.  Bits of a body or chips off a wooden image were prized as still possessing mana, or energy.  Laws were passed forbidding sorcery, but the secrecy it was then practiced in only increased the intrigue and fear it generated.

Related to the schools of sorcery, were those the healers, or herb doctors.  Many of these doctors believed that diseases were caused by sorcery.  Lono-puha was the first to practice healing through medicinal herbs.  The kahunas who came after him learned to diagnose illness by laying out pebbles in the outline of a man.  They matched up the afflicted body parts with the corresponding pebbles and offered prayers to the aumakua of healing.

Jolene, who was living in the tent in Puna, told me about a craft fair that was happening across the street that night.  Her and one of the residents of the hostel, a retired teacher named Virginia, were going.  It had not been a very social trip so far, basically just me alone, looking for uncluttered stretches of beach to play the ukelele on.  This night, then, I thought I’d join them, so made my way across the street when the band was scheduled to play.  They were late.

About a half hour after the music was supposed to begin, a car pulled up and a man with long hair and sunglasses shaped like two little stars got out.  The soundman was frustrated and let him know if the rest of the band wasn’t right behind him, they wouldn’t be getting on the stage that night.  One by one the other band members began to appear, lugging their instruments with them.  It was a pretty informal affair.  The music was Jah-waiian, a mixture of Hawaiian and reggae.

Hilo is not a big place.  I’d been there enough times to recognize a few of the characters who make up the counterculture.  One guy passed by on a skateboard.  I knew he had his own recording studio and performing arts spot.  Another guy, a comedian, I’d seen at a few open mics in the past.  He called himself the California Raisin because he is so bald, wrinkled, and brown.  I’d played at one of the open mics he was at and it had not gone well at all.  All you could hear were big drops of his sweat hitting the floor.

After looking at some of the art and hitting up a kava bar, I wandered over to the Big Head Tavern, where someone told me they were having Hawaiian music.  The two guys playing there were also operating on island time, meaning running a half hour late.  Once they got started, they were just two local boys playing slack key, needing to jump up and high-five each other after every song. 

Sitting there watching them play, made wish we never would’ve moved from Hawaii, that I’d grown up surfing and playing the ukelele.  I could’ve been playing in a band and married to a hula girl by now.  Could that still happen?  Maybe.  I’d need to gather up a ton of mana energy and still get lucky on top of that.  It would also help if I didn’t look so homeless.  That might be a good start.

That night when I got back to the hostel there was an old man lying in the rollaway bed next to me, looking like a mummy that had been unwrapped from his bandages.  There were snores pouring out of his mouth like ancient curses.  At the same time, some local street buskers had set up shop right beneath the window and were making as much commotion as the Bremen Musicians, that odd assembly of a donkey, dog, rooster, and cat, who struck out to make it as musicians and had frightened a houseful of robbers, leaving them with a fortune in gold to divide between them. 

The musicians beneath our window may have divided a fortune of meth, what with all the caterwauling, but nothing more than that.  My hope was that at least they’d wake up the old man, but he kept right on accompanying them on his buzzsaw. 

That was a bad day to wind up so tired because there was a rodeo that I was planning on attending, the Panawea Stampede.  The first vaqueros, or cowboys, were brought from Mexico to the Big Island in 1823.  They were called Espanoles, from Spanish, which later became paniolos, or Hawaiian cowboys.  Earlier, an English officer had gifted King Kamehameha with six cows and a bull, and over time their descendants ran amok, destroying crops and damaging villages.  The cowboys were brought over to bring the population of wild cattle under control and help usher in the beef industry.

Paniolos developed their own unique heritage, a mixture of Hawaiian, European, Latin American, and Asian cultures.  In 1908, three paniolos competed in the American rodeo championships in Wyoming, and one of them, Ikua Purdy, became the champion steer roper of the world.  Paniolos were also responsible for the slack-key guitar style, coming up with different tunings on the guitars that were brought over by the vaqueros, and embellishing on falsetto voicings to create something uniquely Hawaiian.

When I announced my intention to walk to the rodeo that day Joe and Seth were impressed by my resolve, seeing that it was over six miles one way.  Both of them had been in Hilo for years and hadn’t made it there yet.  The old man, Ryan, was sitting there with orange juice and donuts.  He hadn’t been to the rodeo either but he had been in the Armed Forces.  He started talking nonstop, just like he’d been snoring that night, but then he flashed me a toothless smile and I saw that he was kind.  Later, I learned his wife was in the hospital and grew to like him.

To get to the rodeo, I took Kilauea Avenue past the pond and the university, past the golf course, and finally onto the 11, where I walked beside the freeway another mile.  Another half mile and I came to cars and trucks parked beside the road and people walking to the rodeo grounds.  It was ten dollars to get in and they were requiring COVID masks.  I put one on, like a black bandana, and went to sit down on a grassy mound where a group of keikis, or kids, in cowboy hats were making their own tug of war contest with a rope.

There were bleacher seats that were mostly full, so after resting up a bit, I got to my feet and walked around.  They had some kids come out and do some dummy roping, and then there was barrel racing.  After that was an event unique to the Hawaiian rodeo, double mugging, where one cowboy on a horse ropes a steer, and another on foot wrestles it to the ground and ties its legs.  A few times the roper missed and they ended up chasing it clear to the other end of the arena.  By that time the runner would be all tired out and have difficulty lifting the cow off its feet.

It would’ve been a perfect day to be with some family or friends.  Watching the children running around cavorting in their cowboy hats made me realize how much I’d missed out in life, chasing a dream that really hadn’t come true.  The days had all been long, but the years had gone by fast.  They called for an hour intermission, but while I was standing in line for a chili bowl, I saw that black clouds were welling up on the horizon.  If I left early, I’d miss the bull riding, but if I stayed, I risked getting stranded and soaked.  In the end, I started walking again, just because I was so lonely.

By now, my feet were killing me.  After following the 11 Highway back to Kilauea, I had to be careful because it was a narrow, one-way road for a short stretch and the cars wouldn’t be expecting a pedestrian.  By the time I made it back to town, I was limping like I’d been bucked off by one of the bulls, when all I’d really done is walked thirteen miles.  They say growing old isn’t for the faint of heart.  Not like that it isn’t.  Not like that.

In Hawaiian sorcery the corpse of a deceased family member would sometimes be dedicated to become a guardian spirit that might take the form of an owl, a type of lizard called a mo’o, or a shark.  These guardian spirits or gods were called aumakua.  Owls were some of the most famous family protectors.  They could give life back to souls that were lost on the plains and were allies in war and battle.  It was said of them that they belong to both the heaven and earth, and there are many tales of warriors taking their signs from the flight of an owl.

The mo’o were gigantic reptiles that were said to inhabit fishponds.  They were said to grow up to thirty feet long and were as black as the night.  There are many instances of female goddesses that take on the form of a mo’o, such as Kalamainu’u, to whom bodies were dedicated.  Some mo’o goddesses are able to take on a human form to foretell a disaster.  They are able to bring great fish to the fishponds and ward off disease, but may also punish the owners if they do not show charity to the poor.

The most common kind of aumakua, or guardian spirit, is that of the shark.  Offering a corpse to the dedication this protective deity may be a drawn-out ceremony.  The kahuna presiding over it should be able to identify markings on the shark to correspond to characteristics or the clothing of the family member.  Such a shark became a type of pet to the family.  It was fed and would sometimes help to drive fish into their nets.  They could also be used as a fetcher to kill an enemy, but their use was largely beneficent.  Ku-hai-moana, the King Shark, was said to grow up to two hundred feet long, with a mouth as large as a house.

I could’ve used a guardian spirit on this trip, but those seemed to be in short supply, for me and a number of other folks.  A kid had moved into my room who spent every minute in bed looking at his phone.  Then there was old Ryan, snoring all night and talking all day.  There were days where I would’ve liked to lay in bed for ten hours, to do some reading or catch up on some sleep, but eventually the need for privacy would drive me out and I’d head off with my ukelele.  Whenever I go to Hawaii, I am immediately intoxicated by the beauty of it, but over time start feeling dispossessed and lonely.

A group of homeless folks were taking up the picnic table when I wandered down to the lighthouse to play music.  They were indifferent to me.  I walked across the river, looking for a place where I could sit and play by myself, and came to a scenic outlook.  There was a couple ahead of me that were dragging a shopping cart downhill to an encampment that they’d set up in a cove.  They were modern primitives. 

People dream about getting away from it all and living off the land, but it’s not so fun when it starts raining and blowing and you get a toothache.  Living in a car is about as extreme as I’d gone in my quest for freedom.  At the end of the day, I still wanted a door to shut out the rest of the world.

I watched the couple below me unload the shopping cart and then start bickering.  I had to move down the coast a little further to find some peace.  Finally, I came to a quiet green grove with a perch looking down on nothing but waves.  I was just about to sit down on a log there when I looked down and saw a bunch of empty syringes strewn across the grass.  That took the wind out of my song.  I decided to walk up to the Japanese garden and had a stalk of sugar cane that a retired teacher at the hostel had given me that I was using as a walking stick. 

As I walked along the highway, back over the bridge, I passed another man with a walking stick.  He was wearing a baseball hat, a dirty T-shirt, sweatpants, and tennis shoes.  The only difference between us was that I had a ukelele on my back and he had a backpack.  He was probably heading up to the scenic outlook.  It was one more day in paradise.

The Hawaiians call the spirit or soul uhane and the body is kino.  They believe that the spirit has a very independent life away from the body.  It may leave permanently, in which case the body is dead, or it may just wander off for a while, leaving the person asleep or tired.  They believe that the spirit escapes the body this way by exiting through an inner angle of the eye called lua-uhane.  In this case, a kahuna, or priest, may be called in to put a stop to the wandering spirit with the aid of a wreath that is placed on the head of the person.

Only the kahuna can see the uhane, but anyone might possibly see the lapu, or ghost, of a dead person, which has the same human shape and speaks in the same voice.  They live in great fear of this.  It cannot change shapes, but can change sizes, and may enter small objects just as bones or food.  The Hawaiians have two ways of testing if they are dealing with a spirit or a living person.  The first is to lay down leaves.  Ghosts will leave no trace when they cross them.  The second is to look for the reflection in a bowl of water.  Only people have reflections.

A soul that has left the body may often be spotted fluttering over it.  It may have traveled further and joined the spirits of the underworld.  If caught in time, it may be possible to restore it to the body.  This involves pushing it back up through the feet.  Fragrant plants are wrapped around the body.  Chants are also part of the procedure.  The last step is a purifying bath. Successful resuscitation of a departed soul is called kupaku.

Death to the body does not mean death to the spirit.  The spirit will voyage to an underworld or place of the dead, and be led by their guardian spirit, or aumakua, to a leaping place, which is quite often a tree.  A spirit that is abandoned by their aumakua becomes a kuewa, or wandering spirit, and may end up in a barren place feeding on insects.  These malicious spirits are to be feared and often take great delight in leading travelers astray.

The bones of chiefs were preserved in heiaus, or temples, or distributed to the family members as sources of great mana energy.  Common people were bound in a sitting position and cast into deep pits.  The Hawaiians believed in a place of darkness, called Milu, and one of light, called Wakea.  Over the years, their beliefs were largely influenced by Christian conceptions of original sin and heaven and hell. 

One thing I read that I like to believe is that there is a spirit world called Po, which is like a great sea, out of which the lower forms are born.  It relates more to the cycle of life than any definite beginnings and endings.  Humans are born out of the spirit world.  In old age they return to the safe waters again.  At that point they are guarded until they are ready to take a form again, either as a human or some other force of nature.  This is something like reincarnation without the judgement attached to it.

There was an open mic I’d been considering hitting up at a studio called The Jazz Workshop, but when the night came, I was too depressed to want to be around people.  I wandered over to it and saw the comedian, The California Raisin, walk in, looking for an open stage.  In the end, I just wandered over to the Jodo Shinshu Buddhist Mission and stood in front of the statue of the founder, Shinran Shonin, a Japanese monk who helped pioneer the Pure Land belief that salvation is possible to all creatures by believing in the supremely compassionate Amida Buddha.

Leaving there I was accosted by a street hustler, a kuewa, or wandering spirit, of sorts, who first came up and asked me if I’d seen his phone lying around, then took it further and basically accused me of taking it, on a night when I really wasn’t in the mood for it.  I turned and told him firmly to leave me alone, but he kept following on my heels, calling Sir… sir … sir.  Is that my phone?  Can I see it?  Like I was just going to hand it over.

There was music at a place called Pineapple’s and I stopped there to shake the guy, but he moved across the street and waited for me there.  When I started walking again, he began cutting across the street towards me, then stopped in his tracks, seeing the grim look on my face.  There were easier ways to get a free phone than to mess with me.

Old Ryan was snoring as if he were communicating in a primitive language, a series of grunts, snorts, moans, sighs, and deep breaths, that could almost be decoded based on inflection alone.  Then, right at daybreak, he sat up on the edge of his bed and began talking to no one.  I lay on one side, grimacing in resentment after he left the room.  Twenty minutes later he walked back in and shook me awake.  He had cooked breakfast, pancakes, and Portuguese sausage for the two of us.  I knew he was in a lot of pain, his wife being in the hospital and all.

As we ate, I did manage to get a few words in edgewise, basically complaining about my lot in life.  As he saw it, if I hadn’t made all the choices that I had, we never would’ve met.  That was an interesting way to look at it.

It was President’s Day.  That meant little to me, having every day off for years.  That hadn’t always been the plan.  After so many years out of the country, seeing what people did in America just to stay afloat didn’t seem like a very good deal.  You had to pay for everything, even things you didn’t want.  All I needed was a room with a bed, desk, and fan.  Those kinds of situations existed, but even they weren’t cheap.  Prices were out of control.

I decided to walk up to Honoli’I Beach Park, a surf beach a few miles north of town.  It was the same direction as the scenic outlook, over the bridge, right across from the Alae Cemetery.  There were steps to get down to the beach and signs warning of the strong current and dangerous shorebreak.  The waves were a few feet high, and it looked like a good day to paddle out, but fun wasn’t in my vocabulary on this trip.  I was in Hawaii because I needed some place to turn, some sign that since I was born there, I would be welcome there.  Instead, I felt violently dislocated, not just in Hawaii, but everywhere.

There was a fallen tree that I sat down on.  I got my ukelele out of the case and laid it across my knee, but then a wave of depression and fatigue crashed over me, and I put the ukelele down and rested my face in my hands, wanting to cry but empty of tears.  You can only keep hope alive so long before it wears thin.  You need a fresh surge of it, an unexpected smile, a friendly stranger, a compliment that takes you by surprise. 

Eventually, I picked up the ukelele again and started working on my new song.  The melody had come to me on my first day in Kapiolani Park, but the words were taking some time.  It was about someone who takes their freedom too far and ends up wild and deranged, strung out at the end of their rope. 

That night I walked up to the jam at the Jazz Workshop.  I’d met the owner a few times on past visits, but he never seemed to remember my face.  This time he assured me I wouldn’t need to wear the COVID mask I had in my hand.  The scamdemic was over, he let me know.  The good guys had won.  It was hard to know where I might be expected to still wear a mask.  It had been a tedious process to get into Hawaii this time around, with a whole list of requirements that had to be checked off on a website before I was given a wristband at the airport.  Perhaps because of lingering concerns about the virus, it was a small crowd that night.  I took a seat up in the loft and listened to the band play a Bossa Nova number.

Walking back to the hostel after the show, I saw that on this night the open mic was at the Big Head Tavern.  It was some of the same talent I’d seen at the craft fair and Jazz Workshop in the past.  The California Raisin was there.  One guy was wearing a WWE belt.  It was a good crowd, a small crowd. 

I like Hilo, even though I’d bombed at that same open mic a few years back.  I don’t know quite what went wrong.  All I knew was that it wasn’t sounding good, and people stopped listening midway through the first number.  It happens.  You never know how good, or bad, you are until you get up and perform in front of others.  You might get your feelings hurt but it’s better than fooling yourself.  On this night I was content just to listen.