One Year in Hawai’i

One year ago, we landed in Kona, rented a car, and drove over the saddle to our new home on the Hamakua Coast. To anyone else, this might sound like the start of a good story. To us, we intimately know those people who threw their lives across the Pacific Ocean. My gut clenches, knowing what lies ahead of them.

More than going away to college, than biking across the country, than quitting our jobs for Patagonia, more than getting married, more than becoming a father, this has been the most transformative year of my life. I feel much more than one year older. More accepting of responsibility, yeah. More mature, perhaps. More worldly experience, certainly. More beaten down, undoubtedly.

The story of my year has been the story of balancing fatherhood, husbandhood, working a full-time remote job, and the demands of 10 acres in a tropical rainforest climate. Of overcoming my insecurities of making it to my 30s without knowing how to build or fix much of anything, of pushing aside my pride to admit I don’t know and to ask for help.

The highs are high.

The lows are low.

The first weeks. Living out of our suitcases. Regrets over not getting a professional cleaning written into our purchase contract. Water line leaking. Wild pigs sniffing outside our windows and tearing up the yard. Unable to sleep at night. “What have we done?” Mind churning. “How do we get ourselves out of this?”

Lauren wakes up in the middle of the night with a rat the size of a cat scrabbling over her chest. Little fire ants march through the house. We’re desperate to get our cover crop seeds into the ground but they still, still, still have not even shipped yet. We watch monsoon rains wash the bare soil away.

But… the orange jasmine smells so lovely. And the view is so serene. And the gentle afternoon rain so nourishing. And the ocean breeze so soothing. And the neighbors so welcoming, sharing their tools and advice. And there’s a kid Juneberry’s age. And wow, we’re actually doing it, we’re in Hawai’i, we’re on the land.

Some days of “How quickly can we get out of here?” Others of “How could we ever leave this place?”

The only way we survived those first months was because of our sweet neighbors. I was moments away from giving up on fixing the water line, about to spend the cost of a used car to hire a plumber to put a new line in. But Floyd from across the street tells me I can do it, walks the yard to strategize with me, and lends me some tools. The sweet potato farmers leave the fields mounded, trash and residue strewn everywhere, making any cover-cropping very difficult (trust me, I tried. It took me a whole weekend and a handful of blisters to smooth the mounds and do a crappy job “hand-tilling” 1/20 of an acre). But Sky and Rose drive their tractor over and till the whole 10 acres over for us. When we feel alone and shorn of everything familiar, Jeanette and Justin welcome us openly into their family. Their toddler son instantly becomes Juneberry’s best friend. And Juneberry keeps us tethered to what’s important through it all.

We had have no idea what we’re doing. The barest bones of a vision, but we’d never lived rurally, never lived in the tropics, never owned more than a fifth of an acre, never lived so many thousands of miles from anyone or anything we knew. Contemporary life does such an effective job of extending adolescence, of shielding us from obligations to anything beyond ourselves. I somehow made it through 30 years free of obligations, and suddenly I was feeling the full weight of responsibility for my young family, for dragging them out here, and for the blank slate of 10 abused acres.

This place has shown me how reliant I am on familiarity and order. There’s only so much newness and chaos I can take. But there’s no “sit and think about it” here. No multiple-choice tests, no restart buttons on the Xbox, no “sick days” when I just don’t feel like going to work. Every day, the impenetrable clumps of 12-foot tall spiky grass grow more impenetrable, the fire ants and poisonous centipedes close in. I have seventeen years of education within carefully constructed boundaries of right-and-wrong and pass-or-fail. I have zero years of experience in approaching boundless questions like “what do we do with this grass and why does it seem vaguely menacing, waving at me like that?” or “what are all the things I really should be doing while I’m sitting here stressing about this grass?” I miss the days of being the transient help, when someone else figured out what needed to be done, and lived with the consequences.

“Fight or Flight.” I’ve always been a pretty flighty guy. Seemed easier that way. When dragging myself through Home Depot with its eye-popping prices and utterly foreign tools, I want to run away. When someone asks me why I’m trying to manually rake over 10 acres, I run away from the question with the half-truth of “I want to do everything the hard way at least once,” when really, I don’t know what other way there is.

But I’m also sensitive to shame. “I can handle 10 acres,” I said, back when we were waffling on buying this place. That triumphant claim still echoes in the shame-corners of my brain and the only way to open those pockets and let the gooey shame melt out is to throw myself out there. Cutting, slashing, chopping, hauling, mulching, twisting, tying, cutting, slashing… Fix the water line. Spread hundreds of pounds of seed over 10 acres. Build a 1,800-foot perimeter pig fence. Replace the carport roof. Patch and paint the house roof. Cut back rows of 50-foot trees, balancing on a matrix of sticks 6 feet tall, one-handed chainsawing, fire ants showering on me from above, preparing myself to jump if the tree starts falling the wrong way.

It felt like we were sinking, kicking out for something to balance on, something to hold us to let us catch our breath. And eventually, we started to find that solid ground.

For months, we chased the feral pigs as they tore up everything we planted and then some. We had a shoddy inner fence around the house, and interacting with the rest of the 10 acres meant opening gates, walking down a paved road, and opening more gates. Finally, more than halfway into this first year, we secured the perimeter and cleared the land of pigs. In celebration, we tore open a hole in the inner fence and cut a path through the cover crop to our hammock hang-out shed. After segregating ourselves from the field for so long, having fence-less, gate-less walks through the field feels triumphant.

On the flipside of the pig destruction was the overwhelming fecundity of the land. Left to her own devices, the field would quickly grow into a tangle of prickly cane grass, guava trees, and other invasives. Without a tractor, there is no possibility of taming it ourselves. Grazing animals seemed to work for some of our neighbors. So I took some scrap materials out to the field and built a simple shelter and water catchment to support future animals. We were making progress. Putting up a standing structure without weeks of Youtube research, I finally felt like I was getting a hang of this farming handyman thing.

It’s been hard. We’ve had doubts. But I don’t regret it. This place has changed us. Land-based living cultivates a spirit of generosity. When labor is measured in ripe bananas and papayas rather than digits in a savings account, there is no sense in stowing away your wealth for later. Redistributing excess becomes more a means of survival to get out from under piles of rotting fruit. Land-based cultures know this intimately, the most well-known proverb being “the best place to store food is in your neighbors’ stomach.” 

I can’t overstate the effect of living in a community based on a gift economy rather than a monetary one. As a means of exchange, money is incomparably efficient. As a way of relating to and interacting with our surroundings, money is emotionally and spiritually stunting.

In other ways, we’re still trying to figure it out. It should be no secret that it would require the biocapacity of nearly 10 Earths to support the human population if everyone were to live like us and our peers. Forget career choices; forget what school to send Juneberry to; it should be our barest of minimums to build a lifestyle that doesn’t yoke ourselves to the destruction of the Earth’s biocapacity for our descendants and for anyone living outside of ourselves. Anything less is hideously immoral, by any standard.

If we have struck you as seeming “lost” this past decade, it’s because we are. It’s because we inhabit a built environment and culture that has burned any and all waypoints that once pointed toward a morally responsible existence.

After 10 years of searching, I don’t know if we’re any closer. It is lovely to live without the slightest need for heat or A/C, but any visit to or from requires cross-ocean flights. The Hawaiian climate makes closed-loop food production more easily achievable, but also makes glaringly obvious our reliance on an oil-fueled global economy.

“Ecological footprint” can feel too abstract, too cold in its unfeeling calculus — and so we also seek meaningful reconnection with the land and with more-than-human life. Life thrives around the calendar here, in this permanently warm, wet climate, yet this place has made us more antagonistic toward other life than anywhere we’ve lived, with our fears of little fire ants, of rat lungworm parasite, and of the land’s fecundity swallowing us whole. I suit up, cover everything but half my face, and numb my senses against the fire of the chainsaw with headphones and goggles and gloves. I wonder to myself if the rate of biological growth on the land exceeds the biomass I am actively cutting. No matter, the tree will resprout from the stump. The branches and logs left strewn about will re-root and sprout. My cutting does nothing but create ten weed trees where before there was one.

By most measures, the ecological health of this land has improved during our year here. Before we arrived, the land had been continually abused, her soil bled for the intensive cultivation of sweet potatoes. The soil was dead. We’d come across maybe one worm every few dozen shovelfuls of dirt. Now, it feels hard not to chop worms in half with every thrust of my trowel. 

But, abused as the land was, she did give literal tons of sweet potatoes every year. No matter the land’s rehabilitation, I feel pressure to produce human food. If all we do is kick the sweet potato growers off and let the land heal, have we done anything beyond gentrify? A forest elsewhere will be cut down to fill the 10-acre-sized gap in food production.

Sigh.

We’re learning. We are closer to the means of our existence, more face-to-face with the weight of our choices on the land, the community, and the world than if we’d stayed in the city and counted our emissions like calories.

It feels our time here can be split in two. The first half, we thrash to keep our heads above the surface. The second half, we relearned some balance, found some solid ground, got our gardens going, got some chickens and muscovy ducks, and started hosting wwoofers — people who volunteer part-time on farms in exchange for room and board.

365 nights here and we’ve hosted people for more than half those nights and that has been the greatest joy of this place. It hasn’t always been easy, but then, I’ve found easiness rarely correlates with finding meaning and deep joy. After years of bumming on other people’s couches, of working on the visions and projects of others, we get to welcome others here. We’ve gotten to share this place with family, friends, and strangers.

The company, the meals, Juneberry having more adults in her life, it’s all been great. Every time we’re feeling burnt out or like “what’s the point”, a new visitor will give us a jolt of renewed energy. Seeing the land through their fresh perspective reminds us of her beauty, of the charmed lives we live, of how strongly we yearned for years for the chance to get out there and wrestle with it all, no matter the cuts and bruises and bites. 

Some weeks, we just can’t organize ourselves to do much of anything. But then, a wwoofer arrives, and the pressure of having to pretend we’re a farm kicks us into action. I would forever just avoid and forget the falling-down shed in front of our house, but “hey, we need a project for the wwoofers. Let’s figure out how to make something of this shed.”

Having guests has confirmed what we’ve long suspected. Living in community is well worth the effort and struggle. And that working outside with enthusiastic people toward common goals is one of life’s greatest pleasures.

Another confirmation: how sweet it is to play in the gardens with Juneberry. After an unsettled first year of life, we’ve fallen into a charming routine with her. First thing after waking up, she’s rummaging in the cabinet for the chicken food, clapping the rogue chicken back into the run, shooing the ducks back into their pond, finding the latest tomatoes that ripened overnight, peeing on the mulch pile “like dada”, and running down the street to her friend’s house. I was probably in my late 20s before I could pick a tomato plant out of a lineup, and already she can identify “baby ‘mato” seedlings. Weeding, planting seeds, petting cows, and helping us pick and wash lemons. I admit, I’m projecting my own ideas of the good life onto her. Most of the time, she’s happiest playing in gravel or sitting on the couch having a book read to her. She cares most about her shoes and her little purse. But still, toddler life in Hawai’i seems pretty great.

Another confirmation: the fulfillment that comes from working with the organic over the mechanized. It’s like the difference between having a child and having a car. A machine will never be better than its design. That predictability can be comforting. It can also be dulling.

Since we opened the fence around our inner yard, we now walk through the organic landscape rather than on the mechanical road. I’ve been surprised at how much joy I get from watching a trail take shape from the patterns of our movements through the land.

With the grass and cover crops swallowing the land, we let our neighbors rotate their 16 dairy cows through our field. Ah, the joys of working with the cows — getting to know their tendencies, rotating them through patches of grass, milking them once or twice. They felt like teammates. To keep the grass down and improve the pasture, we harnessed their motivations. To get themselves some food, they harnessed ours.

Contrast that to the domineering approach of rolling a tractor across 10 acres every couple weeks to keep the jungle down. Borrrring. A machine will never give the kind of deep, mutual understanding that can be had with other life.

Finally, the land is producing some food to make up for the loss of sweet potatoes. Dozens of gallons of milk every day (sold at the neighborhood farmer’s market), thousands of bananas (enjoyed by guests and neighbors), nearly 100 pounds of lemons every week (sold to juice shops), bushes of Thai basil and lemongrass, monstrous kabocha squash, bunches of kales, bok choy, collards, and some eggs, tomatoes, tomatillos, eggplants, and peppers (good options for weekly pizza night). It’s not a lot, but it’s a start.

We’ve heard many times that the first year somewhere should be dedicated to observing the tendencies of the land before you go around trying to reshape it. New to the tropics, new to Hawai’i and this land, we’ve watched neighbors in order to understand the variety of approaches to this land. Our general plan at this point is to shift the land toward mixed agroforestry and silvopasture. The tropical sun will allow productive tree crops to grow in many vertical layers. Grazing animals will help improve the fertility of the soil, clean up fallen fruit, and maintain the grass between islands of multi-layered guilds of trees. We’ll keep the trade winds moving through the land to keep mosquito and disease pressure down by concentrating trees in small islands.

Or, something like that. The dairy cows are gone but we’re preparing to bring 3 or 4 steers onto the land. We have five islands of trees planted into the field. Kukui, cacao, avocado, breadfruit, mangosteen, sundrop, allspice, macadamia, ice cream bean, pigeon peas.

Two tragedies hang a black curtain on every shred of the above, weighing our year down like no fire ants or punishing tropical sun can.

Those two days I wrote about above, of feeling solid ground under our feet, of opening our inner fence and building the animal shelter. Maybe the 2 mornings out of 365 that I most felt “we’re doing it, we’re really doing it.” The flipside of those days, mere hours after the elation, we were crushed by miscarriages. 

The first miscarriage — 19 weeks old — unspeakably sad. Like nothing that has ever happened to me. The day where it becomes absurd, a true testament to our species’ capacity for delusion, that humans have ever spoken seriously of an “all-powerful, all-good god.” Such a claim strikes me as something only modernity could possibly invent (e.g., the Christian Bible presents a god that is quite clearly neither all-good nor very all-powerful seeming), as humans lose themselves inside abstractions and lose touch with the essentially violent nature of this creation — that animals must violently consume other life to survive.

The second miscarriage — 9 weeks old — howling animal pain at the world, nothing to do but to work myself to exhaustion.

I’ve never been a superstitious person. But I’ve become suspicious of this land, fearful of ancient curses. A land destroyed so callously by her invaders, why wouldn’t she lay a curse on 7 generations? Superstitions fortified by a spate of miscarriages nearby, a newborn death. The fight or flight revving into full gear. I want to flee after the first. “If it happens twice…” Lauren says. And after the second? I don’t know. I just don’t know.

That animal shelter I built? The cows knocked it down the first chance they got. So it goes.

PS: I put the animal shelter back up last week, rebuilding the posts with solid wood rather than hollow bamboo.