MEMOIR
Baby Clothes - Ulua PolesHILO, HI 18 January 2010 |
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We were driving from the airport to the place Ahuimanu, which in Hawaiian means A Gathering of Birds, where there was to be a feast of welcome for my young son. I had brought him back from the Mainland along with my second wife, his stepmother, a woman who had come to hate him.
We drove through a tunnel under Nu’uanu Pali, where in 1790 Kamehameha the Great’s warriors forced Kalanikupule’s warriors over the pali, which means cliff or precipice. Nu’uanu is where that particular pali is.
I started thinking about Hilina Pali, which is over on the Big Island where I live. It’s near Kilauea volcano, and there are feral goats. In a little fenced patch of land about as big as your living room there is a kind of plant called ma’oloa enclosed there against the goats. That little place is where most of the ma’oloa that are alive in the world are hanging on and will continue to hang on if the goats don’t breach the fence and eat them.
At the bottom of Hilina Pali is the place Halape, where back on November 29th, 1975, there was an earthquake and a local tsunami in the night. A man I knew was camping there and the sea took him.
When we came out of the tunnel through Nu’uanu Pali, I thought about warriors leaping, falling, falling onto the roadbed, though in 1790 when they struck, it would have been forest.
I made the left turn and drove past the Japanese cemetery with its famous koi ponds, which are a notable tourist attraction, and then I drove into a residential district near Kaneohe.
I stopped at a traffic signal and I saw a hand-lettered sign taped to the pole. It said “FOR SALE: BABY CLOTHES - ULUA POLES” and I started thinking about that, rather than worrying about bad things that might happen at Ahuimanu, which which is what I had been doing.
Ulua are large strong-fighting ocean fish that you can catch from the shore if you’re willing to perch on rocks and cast out and wait. It is not like surf casting along the Atlantic, where you stand on a sandy beach and heave out over the waves, and sometimes can’t even see past the surf.
With ulua fishing you’re up on lava rocks with waves below, and if you aren’t watching and don’t listen carefully you might not notice that the sea has gone silent, which can mean it’s about to rise suddenly and take you.
I wondered about the combination of baby clothes and fishing poles on the sign.
I imagined that there was this young man who was new at the father business and a little weary of it, so when his wife said she was going to Honolulu to shop, he said he would take the baby for fresh air. When she drove away he went to their garage and chose a pole, and went to their freezer and got aku belly for bait. He wanted a day on the rocks and a nice ulua for them to eat, but he knew if he said he was going fishing she would never let him take the baby.
He put the car seat beside him on the rocks while he fished, and his son started to cry and he turned to see why and he stopped paying attention.
Oh they rose up and were carried down like the warriors, but more slowly, and they didn’t smash on impact, but sank beneath the surf. The car seat bobbed up, and he tried to get to it, but the waves dashed them against lava and they both died.
And I imagined that now the mother wanted to get rid of everything that reminded her, so she made the sign and was waiting and hoping someone would take the clothes and poles soon and it would be finished.
The house at Ahuimanu is tucked up close under the pali. There are no waterfalls when it isn’t raining, but a dozen or more appear when it rains hard. One falls from so high on the pali that wind dissipates the water long before it reaches the valley floor.
My aunt called that one The Crooked Straight and when it floated against the pali she would stop what she was doing and sing from Handel’s Messiah. She had a beautiful voice and a sweet nature, but she had died by the time I saw the sign on my way to Ahuimanu and her house below the waterfalls.
At Ahuimanu my uncle was giving a welcoming speech in Hawaiian when my wife rose up and struck my little boy in front of the guests, because he was not paying attention the way she thought he should have been. I was not quick enough to stop her, but I took my son in my arms to make him safe, and soon after we got back to the Mainland I threw her out.
She went down to North Carolina and then I divorced her. I don’t know where she is now.
Everything she left behind, I sold.
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This was scary: “…if you aren’t watching and don’t listen carefully you might not notice that the sea has gone silent, which can mean it’s about to rise suddenly and take you.”
For a moment while reading I felt quite terrified.
Yeah, I learned that a while ago. I had always thought the keeping-safe trick was to watch your back. Then I learned about tuning into the rhythm and sound and being alert to changes there.
Do I dare say, vis a vis your piece, “it’s about to fall suddenly and take you[r dick off]?”
I was late to the party with yours, and everything I thought of saying had been said by the time I read it. It was very funny.
I used to make my male students cross their legs by talking about subincision. You want to know, look it up. I’m not talking about it.
Oh yikes! Yes. Enough said.
It’s so important to learn new ways to react to environment. I find people all around me are losing touch. For instance, many people don’t walk anymore. So they lose track of being able to calculate distance and think they need a car to travel the simplest distance…
The Hawaiian Islands sound like they have many such places where one must understand rhythms to better interact with environment.
Yeah, that damn quote freaked me out… I always love it, though, when the sea suddenly drops a few feet and you know you’re about to get sprayed. Unless, of course, it’s somewhere that might prove fatal… Otherwise, though, it’s great.
“. . . about to get sprayed . . . .” Have we strayed back to Nick’s piece again?
I have the feeling that the affair of the wiener and the toilet seat is going to have a long half-life on TNB. Considerable spill-over, as it were.
What’s that Hemingway piece about telling a story in six words? Baby shoes. For sale. Never used.
Nice memory.
http://www.snopes.com/language/literary/babyshoes.asp
Believe me, it’s both a gift and a curse.
I recall that… It’s a pretty fucking good answer to ridiculous challenge.
I used to make up stories about strangers or their artifacts, but I don’t do it so often of late.
Why had your wife grown to hate your son? Or is that too personal a thing to share? Or do you altogether know? I realize you may be left only with conjecture. In which case I’ll have to make up a story of my own.
It’s not easy to explain in a public forum, but it had to do with my having a child, her wanting one but by then being (a) too old and (b) married to a vasectomized guy (me), and perhaps most significantly, her having been abused as a child and being unable to get beyond all the terrible harm that abuse causes. My son became an affront to her; she would have preferred that I choose her and abandon him, and I would not.
Well, in the story I had already begun to partly make up, I figured such a choice was involved, though I wouldn’t have invented the rest. Apologies if I put you in an awkward situation by requesting particulars.
No apology needed, Duke.
It’s part of my life, and I’ve incorporated it into some fiction and intend to work it into more, as appropriate. There are many varieties of “the other,” as most folks know. I’m trying to write about a character who deals with ethnographic others and psychological others. Mixed ad lib it makes a potentially potent brew.
The woman my dad married after he and my mother divorced put the same decision to him, though not in so many words, I think. She openly told my younger sister and I to our faces that we were not as important as her biological daughter (our slightly older stepsister).
He chose her over us. Without, apparently, even thinking twice about it.
I’m glad you did.
Wonderful story. I love the way you’ve mixed natural history in with it.
I know other people who have been put in the same situation, Matt, and it’s a tough one. I’m sorry your father’s choice went the wrong way.
This reminds me that I owe you a few paragraphs about seeing oneself reflected in a genetic son and a stepson. I keep meaning to do it.
Thanks, Ducky.
I didn’t comment on your latest piece because I didn’t think my experience being hauled into the Hilo Police Station for having been caught laying rubber in front of a girl’s house was comparable to yours. Of course I could just have commented that I thought it was touching and funny, and let it go at that. But I didn’t. Sorry.
Sad, tragic and beautiful, Don. All of these posts of yours make me nostalgic for the summer I spent in Hawai’i when I was 16.
I think that instinct to create a narrative around the objects & lives of others is part of what separates the writer’s mind from those of others. That ability to intuit that everyday household items might have some deeper story lurking behind or around them. I find myself doing it all the time.
Great closing line, too. Loved how it tied in with your constructed narrative.
Great story, Don!! Oh I love reading your pieces.
Just terrifically told and I, like Nick, was momentarily terrified at your line about the sea going silent.
I’m glad you do, Zara, and that the suddenly-silent sea affected you.
My partner Ruth wrote a poem that included these lines:
” . . .or the pause
between inhale
and exhale.
Something is about to change.”
That expresses the same idea, I think.
Great post, Don. The end was surprising, almost like I was the one being hit.
For some reason I’m struck with the images of feral goats trying to eat the last of the special plants…it’s like an intro to a nature documentary, or a sci-fi story.
All this talk of the ocean sweeping people away makes me want to shuffle off to Buffalo…
Well, it was a volatile situation.
If you shuffle off to Buffalo, I won’t be there. Oddly, nobody seems to want to use the Colden house when we’re not there . . . but people do want to use the Hilo house. How could that be?
Yeah, I remembered the plant enclosure from when I was a kid, but when I was writing the piece I was suspicious of the memory. Thanks to the internet, I learned that my memory was almost entirely true (I had thought that all of the surviving plants were in that enclosure, but I learned that only most of them were . . . close enough). But I have always liked the image. The enclosure is way the hell out there, just sitting in a clearing in the forest, doing its job. It resonated with me, and it seems with you too.
Yes, I can really see those goats and those plants. Quite an arresting image.
I found Buffalo quite charming when I was there. The downtown reminded me of Seattle, but without the pretentiousness. One of these days some savvy entrepreneur will set up shop there, and Buffalo will be known for more than snow, wings, collection agencies, and Scott Norwood.
Don,
You saw that sign and an entire life story developed in your brain that very second.
That’s how it is, sometimes.
I didn’t know she would hit him,
but I knew you would protect him
and be rid of her.
I knew that.
I’m glad you knew that.
Don, I have often admired your writing but now I can say I also admire your restraint. I am still “newish” to the whole father thing and fiercely protective of my children (stems from my own childhood quasi-abandonment). If someone, regardless of my attachment to them, were to strike one of my children…. The presence of witnesses would have given me pause but I might have added “…of a tenth-story window” to the end of your paragraph, had I been in your shoes. You’re a good man for not taking such action.
And your imaginings about the fictional father and son will haunt me for some time….
I’d better say that “struck” covers a lot of territory.
I chose the word for its effect, but I’m beginning to think that readers are interpreting it as “hauled off and slugged” rather than “cuffed.”
The psychological context for him (and me) would be the same, but the overt act less severe than “struck” can imply.
Ah. In that case, I probably would’ve been satisfied with solid hook to the liver in lieu of a staged swan dive.
Beautiful piece, Don. The detours make the end so much more final and devastating.
Stefan! I’m glad you liked this version. As I remember, you saw version 0.1.
I like the juxtaposition of the fantasy of the man and the child and your own story. Without your awareness, a terrible end–emotionally more so than physically–could have come to you and your son. Not every father would have had your impulse or courage. Very touching.
I value your comment, Ronlyn, the more so because I’ve read your novel and seen that you know how to render difficult emotional situations. If I can do as well, I’ll be pleased.
They said good writing makes you feel not so alone and crazy
and now I don’t
because I conjecture people’s life stories
from tidbits so much
it drives me loco.
It’s a form of OCD I imagine.
Or because I live in fantasy and story
rather than reality.
Baby clothes.
I know what you mean about the OCD, not to mention the alone and crazy part — if my little piece helped for a couple of minutes, I’m glad.
Don - this is horrifying and beautiful at the same time. The image of the baby clothes sign… the rocks, the waves, the sea lion, your own defenseless child. By the time I got to the paragraph about your Aunt singing Handel’s Messiah - it all made sense as the soundtrack for this startling piece.
Yes, the “he was despised” part would work, wouldn’t it?
I’m glad you liked it. I don’t know that I was trying for horrifying, but I was trying for startling.
By the way, I’m enjoying The Summer We Fell Apart - almost finished. I can’t resist saying that I read the first fifth or so sitting under a coconut palm (really) on a beach. It would have been perfect except for the Navy Orion P3 doing endless touch-and-gos at the airport, where the gos brought it directly overhead. Lost at sea I’d love to see the P3, but not while trying to read at the beach.
I had been meaning to get something ready for TNB and reading your novel spurred me on — not its contents, but because we met in NYC and I was thinking, Robin got it done…why can’t I? So I got a TNB piece done, anyway.
I read this the other day but didn’t get a chance to comment. But anyway, I love reading your pieces about Hawai’i. It makes me want to go back again and stay there this time.
I’m sorry about your second wife.
And I didn’t get a chance to comment on your comment until now. I’m glad you like these Hawai’i pieces. I’ll post more of them while I’m here — and do come back. If you come to the Big Island, let me know.
We exchanged comments about fathers and hunting a while ago. Tomorrow I’m going up to where I used to hunt with my father, only this time it’s with a group of environmentalists who are trying to restore an area of the mountain to the state it was in a century or more ago. They might succeed — it’s certainly possible. I’m looking forward to seeing how they’re attempting it.