It's about time
Island Edition
I’ve not written for a few days about this Hawaiian adventure, and it’s not because there has been nothing to do. Still, on other trips I’ve usually found the time to write something because I felt a kind of pressure to do so. Here, “island time” has soaked into my bones and has freed me from slavery to deadlines — at least to the artificial, self-imposed kind.
The calendar tells me it’s Tuesday morning, but one of the confusing things about time here is that just a couple of time zones away, it’s already Wednesday morning. My wife and I are fans of the Australian Open tennis championship, so in solidarity with her, I’d turn it on in the evenings or mornings here and watch a little (I suppose I could have been writing during that time). From back home, I somehow understood that our middle of the night was daytime for them (sorry flat-earthers), but from Hawaii where it is daytime at the same time as Hawaii for much of the time, it’s a completely different day. But I digress.
Last Saturday our group started the day by visiting a fishpond. That doesn’t sound too significant. But this is a 700 year-old fish pond, that for the last 30 years has been being restored. Ancient Hawaiians had hundreds of these ponds, which are sections of a bay on the ocean that have been walled off, and very selectively small fish are let in, and big fish are kept from getting out. It’s a very sustainable practice for feeding entire communities. With the influx of outsiders, 90% of these fell into disuse. Then in the 1980s a big powerful foreign company wanted to buy the property and turn it into a golf course (are you sensing a theme?), complete with an island green in the middle of the 8-acre fish pond. The community objected. It turns out they didn’t need another golf course (there are already five within a five mile radius). A local man named Herb was chosen to be a mediator between the city (which had the power to deed the land to whomever they wanted) and the big powerful company. The city didn’t want to sell it to the company, but neither did they want to be in charge of it. So Herb suggested that they give it to him. He would form a non-profit company and work on restoring the fishpond so it might once again be a community resource.
It took them 25 years to remove the mangrove trees from the pond. That has to be done by hand. Each tree has hundreds of roots that have to be cut, and there were more than 10,000 trees growing in the pond. Now they’re working to get the balance of fish and microbes right. Herb told us that after the first 30 years of working on the project, they took a 1-year hiatus just to think about what they have done and plan for the next 30 years. That is a very different perspective on time. I would have though we could take a weekend retreat to think about what’s next. They take a year. This is a longterm project and needs a longterm strategy. But in the meantime, Herb has 5000 Hawaiian kids per year come to the pond to learn about the old ways, which have turned out to be better ways for feeding people and binding a community together. But he also embraces new ways, with lots of university research projects going on there. His work has been recognized with about every award the Island gives out, and he’s even been recognized with the Cesar Chavez award by the US government.
In the afternoon, Colin and I went with our host, Mark, up the hill behind his house. We bushwhacked our way through very dense undergrowth to the site of an old temple. It was about 1000 years old and served as an important gathering place for the first Hawaiians. About all that is left are the stone walls, which we tried to uncover a bit. I’ve visited such places around the world, and I’m always moved with awe by standing in the place these ancient people did who were doing their best to respond to the divine.
Colin and I ended the day with another snorkeling adventure, this time to the electric power plant on the west side of the island. The reef was a little better there, and certainly the visibility was better. Having been to Hawaii some 20 years ago and snorkeling, it’s a little sad to see how the reef has degraded since then — at least in my memory, which happens to coincide with what science is telling us about the warming of the oceans and how coral can’t survive the temperature difference we’re imposing on it.
We have had several snorkeling times across the last few days, all with the faint hope of seeing an octopus. We had to settle for a couple different green sea turtles (which isn’t too bad a thing to settle for).
Sunday was church at the golf course church we’ve been working with. Visitors get presented with a lovely lei. The seminary group made presentations about their creation care work, and then Colin and I got to walk around with the master gardener, Jayme, who is central to the restoration project. And it rained. Hard.
Colin and I hiked some more Monday morning, but had to be back for the group outing on pontoon boats. We were on the boat captained by Paul, who used to be the commandant of the US Coast Guard. That means he was in charge of the entire Coast Guard and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He had stories to tell. But my favorite part of that was at the little marina on the Marine base we were going out from; the staff person had to go through a list of things about how to drive the boat and etiquette on the water (without knowing who he was). Paul just kept nodding and saying, “yes I understand”. He probably wrote that list of rules!
There were other things we did the last few days that were important and worth remembering. I like to have these posts so that I can go back and remember trips like this. But there is some aspect of that that takes away from the experience itself. You know how ridiculous it is at some important event where the spectators are all looking at it through the tiny screen of their phones because they want to record it, but in doing so they don’t actually see the event in person? I don’t want my experience to be diminished by trying to chronicle my experience. That is another aspect of island time, and I want to lean into it further. So I think I’m signing off here. Aloha.