Time Is On My Side

It’s been raining hard here in Hawaii. I made the mistake of heading out to dinner and leaving Sachi the dog in the yard rather than bringing her in the house on one of these rainy evenings. She was quite stressed when I got home to find her pressed up against the fence in the dark. It is not cold, I thought she would be okay, that she would choose her shelter, but like most of us, she prefers the comfort of a soft couch come nightfall. I toweled her off and she curled into a donut in her favorite place. Then I changed out of my own wet clothes — I’d had dinner outside and while I was under a big umbrella, the rain was everywhere — and joined her. I apologized. She’s the reason I’m here, I came to stay with her while her people are on a long trip. She got over it and the next day, it was like it never happened. 

I picked two pineapples this week. One, a little overripe, I twisted out of its spiky bed with my hand, the other I cut with a serrated knife. I also picked a lot of tamarillos (tree tomatoes), a fair number of oranges, a handful of non-tree tomatoes, some green onions, a bunch of mint, and a couple of chayote squash. A friend down the road gave me a few bundles of bok choy and cut a bunch of bananas for me. I have had to buy eggs — the hens that live here are not laying — and yogurt and a few other things. A bucket of yogurt at the Foodland was over twenty dollars, I stared at it in disbelief and then said yes to a trip to the Costco where I got yogurt for a much more manageable price. 

The cost of food here is shocking at times. My response is to do two things. One, take advantage of everything that grows and I can get for free and two, remember that much of it is not from here, it is shipped here from the mainland and that costs money. Right, it comes from the mainland, I tell myself, and I pay what it costs. 

I went through crazy bureaucracy to get here with my dog, It was not cheap but it was still less than leaving him home with a sitter.  It is nice to see him here, his snoot stuck in the grass. Or wiggling on his back because he has found something fragrant to roll in. I had to whisk him off to the bath a few days ago because he had rolled in chicken shit. There was a little green-black smear on his cheek and his right front shoulder. One of the chickens, Henrietta, is free range. Harley must have found some Henrietta droppings and celebrated the opportunity. 

Because I had to go through such trouble to get Harley here — he traveled like a pro, by the way — it’s disappointing that he and Hawaii dog Sachi do not appear to have a buddy comedy in their future. She thinks she’s the boss of me and wants him to know that. He’s so docile and submissive that it’s hardly necessary, but this is her home so I understand. It’s a lot to ask of her, that she accepts her people are gone, someone else is here instead, and there’s another dog around, what? It’s fair that she was a bit strung out when I left her out in the dark. It’s disappointing that they are not friends because I can not leave them alone together. I take Harley with me when possible, he’s fine in the car when it’s not hot, and Sachi can stay in the house. 

I have done very little touristing with my time here. My day job consumes much of my time. By the time the weekend comes, I’m not interested in anything that involves effort; I have spent my weekly allocation of energy on Zoom calls, reviewing documents, and the nonspecific pacing and planning that my job requires In part, my lack of adventuring is the weather; it was much too hot for a beach day last weekend and now there is this monsoon like rain. But in part it is because I am sitting comfortably in the middle of Hawaii Island with a lot of produce and rather than driving somewhere, I would like to cook and walk the dogs and look at the sky. 

This is the third long stay elsewhere I’ve had in two years. I was in Joshua Tree, then Moab, and now Waimea, each time for a whole month. I was working each time, too (day job — contract work — day job) so to call it a vacation would be inaccurate, though certainly there were vacation elements to being in these places. Explorations and splurge-y meals out and a break from the normal routine of my life at home in Seattle. 

The luxury of being able to make these extended trips is not lost on me, but that luxury isn’t a white linen tablecloth kind of luxury. It’s the lack of urgency to do things, the ability to say that something can wait until tomorrow, the opportunity for a place to reveal itself to me over the course of several weeks in ways not possible when I have a week’s vacation only. Okay, I need to be home to feed the chickens, a simple task, really, and to get the dog in before night falls, but that’s just the structure of my days while I’m here. It doesn’t really feel like a limitation when I go to pick oranges to make juice to have with my breakfast. 

I have done some stunning travel in my day, no question, some of it pretty rough, some of it quite luxurious in a traditional sense but this current phase of just trying on another place for long enough to get an idea of what it’s like has been so gratifying. I loved the access being in Twentynine Palms gave me to Joshua Tree National Park, but I found the town bleak, a weird collision of hipster wealth, vacation rentals, and the military. I fell in love with Moab’s sharp winter light, the town shuttered for winter, the dog walks with new friends at sunset. And being back in Hawaii is, well, the more time I spend here, the weirder it seems and that is the best possible outcome. Getting at the weird takes time and you know what? Time is something it feels like I have plenty of.