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Two Days on the Hana Coast

by Michael Freitas

Fifteen minutes into a job is very early for a beer break, even on the Hana Coast.

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I was taking my uncle to his annual visit to Charles Lindbergh's grave in Kipahulu, Hana, Maui, Hawaii. He had been a teenager when Lucky Lindy flew across the Atlantic and the flight had caught my uncle's imagination as it had people all over the world. Later, when Lindbergh had fallen in love with the Hana Coast, my uncle had helped build his house. When Lindbergh was dying, they snuck him on an airplane and flew him to Maui. He spent his last eight days in Kipahulu with his wife, Anne Morrow, planning his funeral and burial. My uncle helped dig the hole, lined it with rocks, made sure it drained properly and laid Lindbergh to rest. Anne Morrow had wanted Charles to tell her about the process of dying, but Lindbergh didn't talk at the end. She did find a note he had written on the nightstand, it said, "I know there is infinity beyond ourselves. I wonder if there is infinity within." My uncle has visited the grave each year to pay his respects.

I stop by more often. It's a beautiful place overlooking the ocean; its stark grounds and trees hide the church and the graveyard from the world. I have a soft spot in my heart for "The Lone Eagle," the old isolationist. He truly was a hero and lived a life of heroic dimensions.

As I drove my uncle from the graveyard in his truck — he's never gotten a driver's license, just using the truck to drive around his property — we were quiet. As we drove pass the pools of Kipahulu, he looked down at the cars and the people, and I knew he was thinking, "too many tourists," but he was silent and we drove back to Hana.

When we got to Hana, I took the lower road and drove by Hana Bay. We drove past Joe's Place, with rooms for about $50 a night. My cousin Eddie, who runs the place, must have been working; he wasn't sitting out front. We drove out of Hana to my uncle's place in Nahiku on the Hana Highway about six miles west of Hana.

My uncle lives in a two-bedroom house with a raised foundation, wood siding, and a tin roof that he built himself. There is a large carport and patio to the west of the house that had been added later and is so filled with stuff that his truck was always parked in the driveway. The house is painted your standard barn red, with white trim, and if you've driven the road, you might have seen him sitting in his kitchen. On the windward side of the house is another door, with steps that he never uses. Over the years the wind and the rain had destroyed the wood. Today was the day that I was going to rebuild the stairs. We had talked about it for years, and the Hawaiian, "bime-bye," had finally arrived.

My uncle hadn't said a word on the drive from Lindbergh's grave and we had probably set a new world record for two Portagees not talking. I parked his truck and he got out and went into the house. I got out my tools and walked to the side door and the steps. I looked at them. I pushed on them and watched them sway. I crawled underneath and yanked at rotten wood and saw the exposed nails. I thought that if I used my sawsall and cut a nail here and a board there, I might be able to knock it down with one push. I began cutting and when it appeared ready, I whispered timber and pushed. It came down in a satisfying heap and there was a smell of rotten wood and mildew in the air.

I stepped back and looked at my handiwork. It looked like a piece of modern sculpture. I was thinking of a title — "The Wind and the Rain in Nahiku," maybe, or "The Futility of It All"— when my uncle came around the corner of the house. He had a can of beer in each hand and he gave me one. My uncle, at 75, has lost most of his lifelong-honored work ethic, and I wasn't getting paid big bucks for this job. In fact, we hadn't even talked about money, but 15 minutes into a job was early for a beer break, even on the Hana Coast. My uncle opened his beer and drank about half of it and out of respect for my elders, I drank half of mine. He looked at me and said, "The DEA, is going to come through here tomorrow and you know how much I hate them tramping all over my mountain."

In Hawaii there's a thing called "Hui Land," in which a family can own a large section of land and in order to own a couple acres one member of the family has to claim it and build a house on it. Land was divided in Hawaii from stream to stream, from the ocean to the mountaintop. No one knows how much land my uncle owns, but it is his mountain. A lot of family members "own a piece" but haven't done anything with it, so we all own it, but no one really does. My uncle controls it, because no one else really cares. My uncle said, "Every year those bastards come around here looking for pakalolo and I'm tried of it."

It was a game played every year in Hana. DEA agents burn some crops, bust a few folks, and then go away. It keeps the price high and the cops pretend it matters. Pakalolo is the $1 cash crop in Hawaii and everyone complains, but not too much. I am not saying everyone grows dope on the Hana Coast, but there are a lot of $30,000 cars on the Hana Highway owned by people who work very little and some retired folks who live a little better than Social Security provides for. "Uncle," I said, "have you been holding out all these years? Have you got a patch?"

"No. You know I don't. I don't smoke that shit and I wouldn't grow it. I'm just tired of those idiots running around like they own the place and I'm tired of the damn helicopters."

"What do you want to do? Shoot'em?"

"No, scare them."

"How?"

"With a wild boar."

"You got any more beer?" I asked. I looked at my piece of modern sculpture and thought, bime-bye.

We walked into his house. He got two beers out of the icebox, and we sat at the kitchen table.

"They always go up the same way," my uncle said. "It's an easy hike. They always find some pakalolo around there. I think someone plants it for them. They chop it down and claim they've destroyed and burned acres of the stuff. Up there on the mountain there's this old drainage culvert that the CCC guys put in during the '30s. It was a stupid idea and it never worked. Now, most of it is filled with mud. There's about ten feet left that is clear and I've slept in it a time or two, when I've been walking and hunting on the mountain."

He looked at his beer, drank the rest, crushed the can on the table, and got two more.

"I've made a cover for the entrance and we can put a wild pig in there and release him when the cops come through. Maybe that'll scare the shit out of them and they'll think twice about coming around here again."

"We?" I said.

"Yeah," he said. "I can't carry the pig by myself."

"Carry? How the hell are we going to get a 200 pound wild boar to let us carry him?"

"I have tranquilizer bullets. We'll shoot him and lock him in the culvert. By morning he'll be plenty pissed off and maybe he'll run right at the cops and scare the hell out of them."

"Where'd you get tranquilizer bullets from?"

"Ah, some haole scientist came through here a few years ago and they were doing a study on the pigs and they tagged some of them to help keep track of them. They hired me to find and shoot them and I kept the extras."

"What happened to the study?" I asked.

"They ran out of money or interest, I don't know what and they never came back."

"Do you think this will work?"

He smiled for the first time that day and said, "Probably not. Too many things can go wrong, but I have to try something."

"You could write your congressman or join a legalization group or . . ."

"Courish, why waste a stamp and I don't join things. Will you help me?"

He was serious, so serious he was asking for help. I had to say yes. I got up from the table and went to a kitchen cabinet. I got his bottle of tequila and two shot glasses. I poured us each a shot. We lifted the shot glasses, clinked them together, and downed them.

"I haven't done anything really stupid in quite a while. I think I'm past due," I said.

He smiled again. He got up from the table and said, "Let's go."

We usually don't drink this much, but we have a lot more fun when we do.

He went outside and I followed. I stood on his porch and looked down into the bed of his pick-up truck. While I'd been working, he'd been loading the truck. I saw rifles, bullets, rope, back packs, sleeping bags, rubber boots, a cooler, and a round metal grate. My uncle was sitting in the passenger seat. I got in and we drove off to go hunt pig.

We drove a couple of miles past the place were the cops were supposed to enter and up a road that my uncle knew. It hadn't been raining as much as usual and we used the four-wheel drive, and it wasn't too bad. We parked the truck under a huge mango tree and got our gear.

My uncle was 75, but still in great shape. He'd been walking this mountain all his life and knew it like the back of his hand. He knew how to find pigs and he never used more than one bullet. He didn't walk fast, just steady, and his gait stayed the same walking on level ground or climbing. One had to work at keeping pace. It was getting near noon and the sun was high overhead, when we could see it through the trees. It was humid and soon we'd be soaked.

Every once in awhile my uncle would yell out, "Where's the pig? Come here, pig." Otherwise we walked on in silence.

As we walked through some vines and low-hanging branches, hacking them with our machetes, I was thinking about back in the day, back when I'd been humping the bonnies carrying a 90-pound pack with a steel helmet on my head, searching for Charlie, hoping not to find him, and sometimes hoping to, when I realized I hadn't been to Nam and I must have been flashing on a movie, maybe "Apocalypse Now," which reminded me to keep an eye out for mangos. They'd taste ono later.

I got back to reality, always a bitch, and watched my uncle's back. It took me a second to register that he had stopped moving and had raised his left arm out as a stop sign and lifted his rifle. I looked to where he was aiming, and I might have seen a flash of black or white through the brush, but perhaps not. I waited. My uncle shot. I heard a grunt and my uncle took off at a very fast pace. I jogged to keep up. When he got to the pig, I was a step behind.

"He's a big boy," my uncle said.

He looked to be about 200 pounds and was an ugly sucker, covered with coarse, long, spiky hair that was mainly black and white, with a powerful head and snoot, bookended by two large tusks that looked impressive. The pig almost had a smile on his face and he looked very relaxed. Good drugs. I gave my uncle the rope I was carrying and helped him tilt the pig onto its spine and my uncle began to tie his legs. I watched as he tied the rope and moved out of the way when he moved to the back legs. He looked like a cowboy at the rodeo tying up a calf. When he was done, I expected him to clap his hands and wave them for the judges to see. He pointed to a good size branch on a tree and told me to get it. I chopped it down and we slipped it through the pig's tied feet and got in position. We didn't know for sure how long he'd be out and we wanted him in the culvert as soon as we could get him there.

My uncle called one, two, three, and we lifted together, a hundred pounds each. It wasn't too bad, but we had a few miles to go before we reached the culvert. At least it was mainly down hill. I definitely was bringing up the rear. The thought of spending a couple of hours staring into a pig's private area wasn't that appealing and I sure hoped that the sedative also shut down his digestive tract. Pig flatulence I could do without.

With only two quick rest stops, we made it back to the culvert. The pig was still dead to the world. We lowered him, untied him from the pole, and dragged and stuffed him in the culvert. My uncle attached the pig hole cover, we made sure it worked, and then we secured it with a lock. The cover had two air holes and by keeping the pig in the dark we hoped to keep him calm. My uncle put a bucket of water in for the pig. The culvert had a bunch of ginger plants in front of it, thoughtfully planted by my uncle a month before. We slid down the other side of the embankment and rested.

"Well, Phase One is done," said my uncle.

"Phase my ass," I said. "That was a serious hike. That damn pig was heavy."

"I know. I couldn't have done it without you. Thanks for the help."

"Now what?" I asked.

"We'll eat, rest, sleep, and wait until morning and hope the cops show up."

"I'll go get the food from the truck. Did you pack any beer?"

"Always, always."

I knew that the pig had kicked my uncle's ass when he didn't come with me. The truck was about a quarter of a mile from the pig and when I got there I loaded up. I put his sleeping bag on my pack and took all the food he'd brought and the cooler with the beer. The load seemed very light after hauling the pig, and I made good time back to the camp. I found my uncle napping. I ate a couple of mangos, drank a couple of beers, and dozed off.

When I awoke, it was about an hour before sunset and my uncle had been awake for a while and was eating and sipping a beer.

"Has the pig woken up yet?" I asked.

"No. He's making some noise, but I think he's still in lala land."

"How do you like the room service?"

"It's okay," said my uncle. "But I hope I get a mint on my pillow."

"You'll get two cracks up side the head if you're lucky," I said.

He looked at me, smiled, and gave me a beer.

We ate mangos, chips, Vienna sausages, oranges, some cheese and crackers, and washed it down with beer.

"You never told me why you stopped working for the government in the '50s and moved back to Nahiku," I said when we were done eating and were watching the night close in around us.

"Oh, I got tired of the stupid work. The thing that killed it was building homes for the people who had been living for years on Bikini Atoll. They moved them from some lovely islands so they could test atomic bombs. The people who lived there were happy and they had lived there for thousands of years and they moved them to some islands that weren't worth a damn and we built these dumb cheap wooden houses that they didn't want. It was so sad to watch those folks leave their homes. They were very sad, crying and wailing, and the soldiers were shoving them on the boats with rifles and threats. It took the heart out of me. I felt dirty and I decided I wasn't gonna work for people who would do that to people. I guess I should be grateful that they didn't just blow them up."

"Yeah, I remember reading something about those folks and that they want to go home. They've always wanted to go home. You lost your faith in government because of that?"

"There wasn't much to lose, but I began to look at things in a different way and I just learned to stay out of the government's way and I stopped seeing it as a force for good. Just force. Living here in Nahiku makes it pretty easy, but each year it gets closer and closer."

"You have no idea what it's like on the mainland," I said.

"I have an idea, and that's all I want to have. Let's go to sleep. We need to be up at daybreak."

"Yeah. Good night, Uncle."

"Good night, you pig hauler."

We both awoke at first light and the pig was awake too. We were anxious and nervous. We didn't know what was going to happen. Would the cops show up? What would the pig do? Would he charge them, run away in the forest, or smell us, make a U-turn and come after us? If the pig charged the cops, would they try to shoot him or run? A few scared cops with 9mms could do a lot of damage and we had to keep our heads down. Would the pig go nuts and gore one of the cops? There was a lot that could go wrong. In the early morning light this seemed like a pretty dumb idea.

"You ready, Uncle?" I asked.

"How stupid does this seem to you?" he asked.

"Pretty stupid."

"Yeah. You can go back to the truck and wait for me. I can do what needs to be done. No sense in both of us getting in trouble."

"You're gonna do it?" I said.

"Yes. I have to."

"Well, I ain't going nowhere."

"Good," he said and we waited.

The pig sensed the cops before we did. He began grunting and ramming his head against the grate. We heard them before we saw them. We couldn't make out the words, but they seemed pretty loud. We saw the branches and bushes move as they made their way up the hill. Soon they were in the clearing before us. We watched them over the embankment. There were three of them, wearing cop windbreakers, and they stopped to catch their breath and drink some water at the edge of the clearing.

The leader was about 40, rather short, but lean and tough looking. The other two were in their mid-20s and soft looking, like they had spent a lot of time behind a desk.

The older one said, "I don't think we have too much more to go. There's always some shit in this area. Let's go. The quicker we find some stuff, the quicker we can get out of this hothouse."

The leader took off as the other two put the caps back on their water bottles and my uncle pulled the rope. The pig jumped out of the culvert and stopped before the ginger plants. He put his nose in the air. He ran through the plants and headed for the DEA agents.

The three cops didn't notice the pig until it was too late. They'd been walking up hill with their heads down. The pig hit the lead cop on a dead run and the cop went huli up about ten feet in the air and landed chest first and you could hear the woof as the air was knocked out of him.

I felt for him. It had happened to me once when I was playing high school football. I was playing fullback and they had called a draw play for me. It was the perfect play. When I got the ball and started running all I saw were the goal posts in front of me. I had gotten about 15 yards and was at a full head of steam when a skinny damn cornerback sneaked up from the side and hit me at the ankles and I went flying through the air. I had the football in my right arm clutched to my chest and when I hit the ground, the football was nestled in my solar plexus and my breath was gone. I went from dreams of football glory to rolling on the ground like a fish gasping for air. When I kind of got my breath back and was being helped off the field, my coach yelled at me, "What the hell are you doing? You're a fullback, not a halfback. You ain't got no moves. You're spozed to run through people, not try and fake them out." I kept that in mind as I looked down to see if my lungs were still inside my chest.

My coach would have been proud of the pig. He'd run right through the cop. The cop was rolling on the ground trying to breathe. The other two stood and watched. The pig was about ten feet away and he began to back up toward the fallen cop. I looked at my uncle and he had raised his rifle and had the pig locked in. The pig backed up to the cop lifted his right leg and pissed in his face. Which was about the time that the cop got his breath back and he got a mouthful of pig piss as he gasped for air.

The pig stopped peeing and took off full speed through the brush and was gone. You could hear him, but he was gone.

I looked at my uncle and he had his hand over his mouth like a Japanese school girl and he was laughing so hard tears were coming out of his eyes. I was holding my side and trying to control my laughter and we both rolled down the embankment and landed in a heap together.

The cop was on his hands and knees, now, as I crawled back up the embankment, and watched him breathing in big gasps and trying to spit at the same time. The other two cops were hovering near him trying to help, but they looked like they didn't want to touch him. They kept looking to where the pig had run, with their guns drawn, worried that maybe he was going to come back.

The cop finally got on his feet, inhaled deeply and shouted, "Holy fuck'n' shit!" Well spoken, I thought. My uncle whispered, "He's lucky it wasn't shit." I pushed him and he slid back down the slope, laughing soundlessly.

"Why didn't you idiots shoot that damn pig?" The lead cop yelled.

"He was too close," said one.

"Yeah, we didn't want to shoot you," said the other.

"Shit. You idiots couldn't hit anything anyway." The lead cop said. He ripped his windbreaker off, pulled his T-shirt over his head, and wiped his face with it. He spit a few more times and then drank from his water bottle and spit that out. He shook his head and wiped his face again. He bent down, lifted his pant leg and looked at his ankle. There was a large red bump there that seemed to get bigger as I watched.

"That's gonna bruise," said one of the idiots.

"If you don't shut up, I'm gonna bruise you, you son of a bitch. What the hell am I doing? Running around this damn tropical jungle looking for dope. I'm the damn dope. I gotta get a different job. I just got run over by a goddamn wild boar. I didn't even see him coming. I got knocked over by a wild boar and then he pissed on me. Holy shit. I got to retire. I can't do this shit anymore. This is fuck'n' nuts. I got to change my life. This is so stupid. So dumb. Shit."

He began to walk around gingerly using his right leg. One of the other cops went to give him a hand and he brushed it away.

"Let's get the hell out of here," he said.

"What about the search?"

"Fuck the search. You idiots are going to take me to Joe's Place and I'm going take me a hot, hot shower. And you're gonna go to Hasegawa's and buy a bottle — no two bottles — of Jack Daniel's, and a bottle of mouthwash. I'm going to get pass-out drunk, and maybe when I wake up, I'll have forgotten this whole day."

"What are we gonna do?"

"Do whatever you want. I drink alone."

They started back down the hill and you could hear them cursing, yelling, and whining for a while. Then the noise faded and only the branches moved. My uncle had come up next to me again and we looked at each other and smiled. He hit me on the shoulder and I rubbed his head. Our smiles got bigger and we started to laugh. We got louder and we rolled down the slope again and laughed and hit the ground and staggered to get to our feet and laughed some more. When we were exhausted, we just looked at each other and smiled.

"We need to get out of here," I said.

"The sooner, the better," he agreed.

We began to clean up our mess and to pack the backpack. My uncle went to get the pig cover and the rope. We tried to make the area look like we'd never been there and left.

"We have one thing on our side," said my uncle. "They're too arrogant to believe that we could plan something like this. They think we're too stupid. Plus, it's better to think you were just knocked over by a wild boar, than to think that someone had set a trap."

"Are we going back to your house?" I said.

"No, we'll go to Haiku and we'll tell people that we went there early in the morning to get some material to fix the steps."

"I could use a couple of things."

"Good, we'll buy them. We'll also buy some steaks, beer, and maybe some tequila; we need to celebrate tonight. We got to toast Billy, Billy the Boar. That son of a bitch really came through. I can't believe it worked. I can't believe it worked so good and like that."

He looked at me. Patted me on the shoulder and we hiked back to the truck.

Some days are better than others.

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