Thumb Out and Bound for the Underworld, Part 2
The journey is not a line, but a circle.
Aloha Dear Readers,
Last week I left you with yet another vision of me standing roadside with my thumb out hitching a ride north on Moku o Keawe, which I knew as the Big Island back then.
That first episode of hitchhiking along the Kona Coast that deposited me without a clue in Waipi’o Valley took place in 1994. This time it is 2009. I have finally realized that my time in Waipi’o was both a literal and initiatory descent into the Underworld and have managed to crawl back after spending way too many years in Hell, by that I mean depressed, drinking way too much, and generally hating myself and life.
I am not quite back in the village. I live on the edge, again literally and metaphorically. By this I mean I have very little money so often find myself in edgy situations like hitchhiking, and that I also am not quite fully living in human society. There is no place for me. I know I have a gift to give the village, but I’m still not sure how to translate it into something meaningful to human ears. I am a little more deer than human. Some friends and community members catch a glimpse of me coming out of the deep thickets at dusk to stand at the edge of fields and encourage me to take a step into the goldenrod. I am forever grateful for that. What will happen out there in the open? I still tell myself, but I’m starting to cross the road without being convinced I will freeze in headlights.
The winter after I journeyed to Peru, leaving Block Island for the first time in 10 years, I am back on the Big Island. I am a work trader at a retreat center at South Point. To reach the center one must drive down a dirt lane and through a cow pasture where a giant bull snorts and paces. I don’t have a car, so it’s not me driving. I make a friend there, a German woman named Renate who is building a house on the property.
We meet in unusual circumstances. The night before I had arrived via the Hele-On bus that dropped me off at the top of South Point Road. A taciturn Danish woman named Sonja picked me up and transported me through the cow pasture and showed me my hale, a plywood shack with a bed and a shelf. There was a composting the toilet a short walk from the shack. The shower head was attached to a tree and when I stood naked under it it felt like I was being cleansed by the leaves and branches. Before she left me to the pitch dark (there was no electricity), Sonja pointed in the direction of what she said was a communal kitchen. She didn’t seem to want to answer questions, so I didn’t ask any.
Did I say it was very dark? There was no electricity. There were stars and a moon I assume, but I couldn’t see them through the canopy. I had only a backpack with me, a few clothes, a book-Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts, and an eagle feather gifted me by my friend Jill who had found it on an Australian beach. “It’s a sea eagle,” she said when she gave it to me. I was honored, but not sure why she chose me. Back then I felt continually unworthy. I was going through the motions of life, not really living it, even though it looked like I was having all sorts of adventures. I was on my own strange looking version of autopilot, living year round on an island we joked was for misfit toys (one friend said it wasn't that different from the insane asylum), occasionally breaking out into wider circles each winter, hustling back to Block Island after a few months when the money had run out to begin again the cycle of eking out a living making sandwiches at Three Sisters for the masses, pulling weeds, bottling honey, sitting at an art gallery where no one really bought anything.
In that darkest of dark, I lay the sea eagle feather on the little shelf, unearthed a flashlight from my backpack and read a few pages of Shantaram before falling asleep. All night long the bull paced the edge of the barb wire waiting for someone to open the gate. In the morning, the eagle feather was gone.
I looked everywhere for it. Under the hale, in the vines and plants outside the house, in my backpack-but the feather never materialized. It crossed my mind that the spirits of the land took a fancy to it and took it in exchange for letting me stay there and I’ve believed that ever since. Where else could it have gone? I know for sure that Sonja didn’t steal it and there were no other humans for miles around. The bull and his harem weren’t interested in feathers. Their focus was downward, stomping hooves and nose to sweet smelling grass. They knew their place. Feathers were of no interest.
After surrendering my feather to the unseen I meandered down the path in the direction Sonja had pointed the night before, found the communal kitchen, which I actually had to myself. Suddenly the peace of the morning was blasted skyward by a chainsaw above me and a voice bellowing in German. What’s this? Have I stepped over a threshold into a Wagner opera? Looking up, I expected to see a mythical beast, maybe some apocalyptic Valkyries, but there in the crook of a tree brandishing the chainsaw I saw a woman. Turns out she’d been cursing the chainsaw and her inability to reach out far enough to sever the branch she was after, but when she saw me step into focus, she yelled down at me. I honestly can’t remember what she asked me, but I did what I was told, and thus began my friendship with Renate.
(It was the first time I had met someone in the crook of a tree. If you want to meet more about this astonishing Aries woman I’ve written a whole essay on her in another issue of The Corpus Callosum Chronicles, which you can read by clicking here.)
Renate and I had a lot of adventures in her Toyota truck. (I came in handy when we reached the cattle gate. She was afraid of the bull and made me get out and open and close it, exposing myself the possible risk of being charged and trampled), but that never happened. We rattled through the field to the main road just fine.
There was one day however, when she was unable for an adventure. I had the day off from pulling weeds for my work-trade and wanted to go to a beach. Note-the Big Island is really big. If you are an ocean lover and want to do a work trade, check to see if that farm is anywhere near the water or you will find yourself, like me, with your thumb out reliant on the kindness or creepiness of strangers.
I remember the date specifically, January 20, 2009, because it was the day of Barack Obama’s first inauguration. I was still totally disoriented in space and had no idea that what I was calling the side of the road was Mauna Loa, the “long mountain,” but that day I was delivered off her flank by one of half a dozen rides into the ocean at Ho’okena (after watching Obama take the oath of office in the lobby of the Manago Hotel in Captain Cook), and in that shockingly clear, blue water, a long forgotten dream from childhood found me. As I drifted, out of nowhere, a single dolphin approached me and floated next to me eye to eye. Soon a pod appeared and they took me in and I was never the same.
It was only for a half hour probably, but it seemed like forever, and after that encounter time did speed up. I hitched back to South Point, hiked down the dirt road and walked through the bull’s field with quivering legs, and when I got to the communal kitchen found Renate all riled up, determined to abandon building her house and scanning Craigslist for a new place.
Pretty quickly she found something in Captain Cook, where I’d just had my life-changing mystical dolphin encounter. I wanted to be back there with all the blood in my body, but I literally had $200. I can’t believe I used to travel like that, but I did and somehow it all worked out. Even more than that, having no money made me reliant on chance in a way that wouldn’t have happened if I’d been able to separate myself from my environment by its seeming security.
“Do you want to come live with me in Captain Cook?” Renate asked.
“But Renate, I have no money. I have to do work-trade.” I replied.
“Bah,” was her response. “You can cook for me and help me with my English.”
And that was that. No more hitchhiking for me. I was transported every morning in the Toyota to Kealakekua Bay where Renate and I scrambled down the black lava slope and hurled ourselves into the waves. If the dolphins weren’t there we were part of the crazy group that checked the other bays until we hopefully found them. Being with them was addicting. I felt myself scanning the water for them the same way I’d seen drug addicts pretend they weren’t eyeing how much cocaine was left.
The bays were giant mirrors and the dolphins kindly put up with us. There was a lot of talk about the dolphins expanding everyone’s frequency and opening hearts that I was squeamish about, but it was true. Some people were so opened up they would weep in the middle of the bay. Out of the water, everybody seemed much more spiritual than me. Once again, I judged myself as less than everybody else, but slowly that was starting to shift. I may have not been consciously aware of all these dimensions everyone one was talking about, but I was a strong and brave swimmer who loved the ocean with my whole body, coaxing Renate out farther and farther until that day on her 49th birthday when I sent a mental image to a dolphin to swim next to her so I could dive under a take a picture of them together on her birthday and it did!
The dolphins didn’t make me feel like I was special. It was clear they loved everybody. They would spin out of the water next to kayaks so the people on boats could also get a dose of them, but they did create an opening in the armor around my heart that was guarding some deep secrets I’d locked away in my body.
After a few months, it was time for me to go back to work on Block Island. Renate and I parted ways and I found myself back on BI in April, the cruelest month, living in my friends inn The Hygeia House. If you know your Greek mythology, you’ll know that Hygiea is the goddess of healing, and if you know anything about healing, you’ll know that, like a scab on a wound or an ugly truth looked at fully, can be painful. Excruciating.
Climbing out of the Underworld is not linear. I was about to go back down again. High from living on Mauna Loa and swimming in the crystalline rays of Kealakekua Bay, strengthened by my time with the dolphins, my body was ready to speak. I had no idea what was coming.
Stay tuned next week for Part 3! I hope you are enjoying this story so far. Please subscribe if you haven’t and share this post with like minded friends far and wide!
photo of me and dolphins by Sam Nuttman: @samnuttman @totheincredible