After the story, a strange feeling settled over the group. The waves near us crashing and sparkling white in the moonlight seemed pregnant with mythic power as if a shark could appear as we watched. The night on the other side seemed menacing and watchful. Crouching, ready to pounce.
Finally I whispered, “They were Mormon?”
He seemed surprised by my question and said, “Yeah, how did you like know that? Whoa. This is like creeping me out.”
“There was some Mormon stuff in the story you told.”
“Wicked strange. Are you a Mormon? Is that why you don’t do the doobie?”
“Yeah. More or less.”
“Yeah dude was a Mormon, but says he was like exorcized when he did time in Kulani prison for stealing cattle up on Parker Ranch lands. Slapped him harsh they did, but fact is he learned how to grow emjay when he was clearing land for the Hawaii DSS to make that arboretum north of Hilo Town.”
“Excommunicated.”
“Yeah, whatever, he was Xed out of existence.”
Judy weighed in, “Tell her about the nightwalkers.”
“Man … You don’t want to go there. That’s some wild ass shizz that was, like man I’m all creeped out even worse about that.”
“Creepy is as creepy does.”
“So like tell her anyway. I ain’t heard nothing like that. Tell her.”
“You tell her!”
“OK. I will. So he says this is true. He says he’s like seen it five or six times and he knows his brother died from them. He says his brother was no way old enough or drunk enough to like have a heart attack and they got him sure.”
“What happened?”
Mikey interrupts, “Nightwalkers got him!”
“Nightwalkers?”
Judy again, “Yeah, at night these armies of old time Hawaiians come marching through the streets all ghost and see-through like. You can hear them singing old Hawaiian songs and they come with their war clubs and all and if they find you awake they kill you with a blow from the clubs. It don’t leave no mark but you are dead nonetheless. Doctors will tell you it was a heart attack or a brain stroke or some such nonsense. At night you can hear them marching. He says the only thing you can do is drop down and pretend you are asleep.”
I could not suppress my smile, “Can’t you just hide under your blanket? Aren’t there rules about ghosts getting at you under a blanket?”
“This is real. Lots of people have seen them! Not just a few and in every case if they hadn’t pretended they were sawing logs it would have been the end. Believe or don’t but man you are a fool if you don’t. And if you don’t take this serious you’ll likely end up losing your other hand.”
“Mikey!”
Realizing what he just said, he slapped a hand over his mouth. Then said soberly (especially given how high he was), repentantly, “I am so sorry. I am. Really, really sorry. I didn’t mean no offense. It’s like the weed talking. I didn’t mean nothing. It’s just you can’t ignore the mysterious things of the world. There are stranger things than we know. But you know … crap … I’m really sorry.”
I wasn’t offended. I was tired of this conversation with a couple of flower children dosed up on wacky weed, however, and so decided to exit the scene.
“Look, no worries. But I’m tired and think I’ll go to bed. Thanks for dinner. That was very generous of you. Goodnight.”
I stood up. I felt sort of bad. They were both obviously in pain thinking they had offended me. And who knows maybe at some level I was. He was right. There are dangers in the world and taking ayahuasca and letting your hand fall in a fire is pretty foolish. But that’s not why I was leaving. I was tired of their youth and their sense that life was nothing more than chasing a more exquisite high. Worst of all, I was missing my solitary contemplations because of them.
As I was walking away I could hear Judy scolding Mickey, “You shithead! Why did you say that? We were having such a nice conversation. Man, you are really an asshole you know that?”
I couldn’t make out what he mumbled back.
In the morning, I went on a small sunrise hike to see if I could catch sight of some monk seals that I’d been told visited a little cove occasionally. When I got back I planned to make breakfast for my friends and apologize for my abrupt departure and let them know I had no hard feelings. They were gone. On my sleeping bag they had laid some wild flowers and a package of freeze dried chili. On a note they had written:
Namaste, We got up early to make a run for the road to get some supplies up mauka side then head north past Hilo and up the windward coast. It was groovy to get to know you a bit. I hope we did not offend or leave you with a downer about our stop in this quiet paradise. Should you ever find yourself in Boston please look us up and say hi. We leave these gifts that you might remember us more fondly than we deserve. Love is all you need, but we are still working on it.
Peace and Love,
Judy Hauptman and Mikey Singer
OK. That was sweet. Now I felt guilty. They were just exploring the world like I was and I had been anything but gracious. I’d done everything I could to drive them away—not helping them find water, leaving coolly after I’d been given a generous meal, ignoring them when they wanted to talk. The irony was running thick in the air around me. What did their arrival interrupt? My contemplation on love. What did I do? I drove them off. What did they leave me? Their love. Ouch.
So here I sit. The day has progressed and I feel glum. Disappointed in myself for treating the others so shabbily. I cannot bring myself to wish them back. I feel torn and disappointed that I drove them away and that they left. As if to reflect my mood clouds have gathered. Rain is rare here on the edge of the Kau Desert so I’m not over worried about a downpour, but the overcast sky and increasing wind seems to remind me of the guilt that I can’t seem to suppress.
I try to shake it off with a swim, but that backfires because the wind is whipping up the waves making it choppier than makes for good snorkeling. I start to climb out and cut my leg on a piece of coral and although the wound is not deep it stings in the salty water. I get back to camp and realize I’m out of water. Mostly because I didn’t pull some out of the little cave in the presence of the others. I didn’t want to give its location to the hippies, and so my misfortune starts to feel like a just punishment for bad behavior—So you want to reflect on love do you, why didn’t you start with the nice couple from Boston?
I pick up my apple cider jug and make an easy climb down the fifteen-foot drop into the cave and standing on a little ledge fill the bottle. I decide not to clean up my wound so near to the source of the spring, so I climb back out and scramble back to camp. I trip on a driftwood log the flower children left on the trail, apparently while dragging their benches over last night. I lose about half the water and find I’m limping slightly because in the fall, I may have twisted my ankle. I call them several names, then remember how I treated them. I’m frustrated with myself. I’m frustrated with them. I’m frustrated that I have been made to feel so lousy. I’m frustrated with the wind and the coral that cut my leg open. I’m angry the sun has disappeared.
I clean the wound and test my ankle for real damage. It’s already feeling better and I can walk on it, but worst-case scenarios start to run through my head: What if I get injured and can’t walk back to the car? No one knows where I am on the Big Island. What if … what if … what if.
I sit on my sleeping bag and fall on my back then turn over onto my side and start to cry. Why not? I’m feeling sorry for myself. I don’t even have a hand. I’ve lost badminton. I’ve lost two years of my life. I’ve lost everything I’ve ever valued. Has anyone been through this much? I can’t even go camping without it being ruined.
I fall into a heavy sleep and when I awake it is late afternoon. I’m groggy and thick headed. It was not a good nap. I stand up and walk away from my camp to use the bathroom. The Filipino man who gave away so many secrets about this place, warned me that the ghosts of the an
cestors here are erratic and unpredictable, given to whims, and dangerous when not respected. He said that when I use the bathroom, that I should explain my need to the spirits of the place and apologize for despoiling the land and then to cover it all with soil. I think the notion that I should make such a fuss about taking a pee quaint, but I had followed his advice so far on this camp—making a game of thanking the ghosts for the use of their land. It did make me feel good—like I was tapping into something deep; recognizing the sacracy of the land. But this time I ignore the advice. I pee on the ground. I feel disappointed in myself and in response raise my middle finger to the landscape. How dare it make me feel like I owed it an apology for peeing! But the act feels like a transgression. I’ve breached something and the place doesn’t feel the same.
As I leave and start to walk back to camp, I catch something out of the corner of my eye, but when I turn toward it, nothing. It is strangely unnerving. The impression of motion was strong, but I don’t see so much as a bird. I think to myself, I know there is nothing to this, however if I ignore my fear, it will just keep pestering me. Better safe than sorry as they say. So I return and say, “Look ghosts, I had to pee. So sorry and all that.” The foreboding does not go away. I slept longer than I intended and I find that when I pulled out the water bottle and bandaged my leg I didn’t zip my knapsack back up and mongooses have pulled out some trail snacks and scattered them about.
I need more water, so I return to the cave for more. I have trouble carrying more than one canteen at a time with only the one hand, so I make two trips. I start the fire and go back to the large boulders and crags where the opihi are found. I climb up on the black volcanic rock and start to pry some of the little gastropods up. I’ve loaded up only a small number into my camp pan. I bend down, working on one when I glance back just in the nick of time and see a rogue wave bearing down on me. I scream and leap up the rock in a half jump, half spring, getting out of the way just in time for it to crash at my heels. If it had pulled me in, I would be lost. I’m shaking. I’ve lost my knife and pan both which I left behind when I fled the wave. I stare at the water crashing below me and I feel an anger and a presence from the ocean. It feels like it is reaching out for me, trying to find a way to pull me back to it. I force my rational mind to take control. I go over the facts at hand, spell out clearly the laws of the universe, and dismiss any intent on the part of inanimate objects. I start to settle down when I see a figure dart past a slit formed by two large rocks obscuring all but a small section of sandy shore. I’m filled with fear that pimples my skin and sends chills down my back. I climb a little higher and move off to the left about 100 meters, not the way I came in. I don’t know who is waiting for me. I get back on the shore and carefully approach the lagoon and my camp. I see no one. My fire is burning nicely. I look for footprints and don’t see anything obvious or new. It’s all as it should be. I scan the shoreline looking for who I might have seen back on the rocks. There is no one. I shout, “Hey. I see you! Come out of there.” Trying to trick whoever it is out of the shadows, but no one appears.
I return to my fire. I feel like I’m being watched and I keep turning round and looking up and down the beach, at the rocks, up to the Pali. But there is no one here. With my pan gone I cannot cook my noodles so I munch on them raw. It’s not as grim as it sounds, but I miss the warmth that the cooked food brings. And I miss the opihi.
“Gilda!” A low voice. Almost a bark.
I spin around again something moves out of the corner of my eye, but no one is there and there is nowhere they could have gone. I shout:
“Who’s there? Show yourself!”
But no one is there.
The sun is starting to set and I’m scared. Terrified. Malice surrounds me. My knife is gone so I look around for a weapon. I find a piece of driftwood with just the right shape for a club. I stoke the fire high and wait.
The sun has set and I’m watching the fire. I get up and walk around facing away from the flames and stare into the darkness waiting, watching. The fire pops and I jump. The sound of the waves and the wind masks any other sound. In the complexity of those reverberations of the wind through the rocks and palms and grasses and over the top of the waves one can hear multiple voices. And in the break of the surf channeled through the flutes and horns of a thousand crevasses and cracks, the symphony is complex and varied. I hear within it voices. I hear song. I hear the thromb of ancient drums and the chants of long dead warriors. I feel the curses of Kahuna and shamans. I hear the howl of ghosts. They all are proclaiming one thing: I do not belong here.
And then I see them coming from the Pali. Nightwalkers, moving white and insubstantial toward me from a great distance. I don’t know what to do and like a child I dive into my sleeping bag. My mockery of my friend’s story seems to be condemning me. I can hear the tattoo of their tramp and the refrain of their cadence call as they bellow their war chant and send it riding on the wind. Demonic ethers spill from their voices corrupting the landscape and poisoning the air. These baleful apparitions will offer no quarter to the embodied. I know that with certainty. I am breathing like a captured animal—my chest heaving, sweat soaking my shirt, I am trembling like a hypothermic ice bather. They will find my body mongoose-gnawed and cold. A prayer starts to form as I wonder how I will die. And I know I will die. There is a certainty that I am about to leave this world that is crystal clear and undeniable. It is not a belief, but a kind of knowledge. I am doomed.
I pause in my fear as a little thought surfaces. How will I die? How exactly will they kill me? How effective are their spectral weapons? Other than terror, what power have they? To my mind suddenly comes the message a biologist friend of mine wrote from a bed and breakfast he and his wife were staying in near Bar Harbor, Maine shortly before I left for Vietnam:
It appears this bed and breakfast is haunted. Last night as the crescent moon’s light breached our western window, a ghost materialized, passing in through the dressing table mirror. A great sea captain he appeared to be and when he saw my eyes fixed upon his visage he let out a terrible and otherworldly moan. But I smiled, and he, flummoxed at his impotence, let out another Jacob Marley-like wail. It seemed too textbook to me. Unoriginal and hackneyed. “Come,” I said reproachfully, “let’s have no more of these carnival ride shenanigans. I am a man of science. Tell me by what metaphysics you appear. Demonstrate by what chemistry, however strangely mercurial, you are structured.” So we spoke long into the night, but not of natural philosophy as I intended, for the conversation turned to the gray of the sea and the song of whales and the deeds of courage that pressed forward will one day tame the stars. We showed one another our scars won by honor and accident. And as the rosy-fingered dawn began to blank the eastern stars (laughing together at his reference to Homer, for there is ken shared between the living and the dead), and as the smell of bacon and coffee from the kitchens below wafted into the room, he bowed and doffed his hat and departed.
A creative work obviously but as I recall it, courage gathers and I stick my head out of my bag and challenge the nightwalkers: “Tell me by what metaphysics you appear! Demonstrate by what physics you are bound! I will have no more of your shenanigans. Name your power or fade away!”
And suddenly I start to laugh. The absurdity of my curled up in a shivering ball of jelly to avoid warrior ghosts hits me full force. I laugh and laugh. Now I am shaking in mirth. In sidesplitting laughter I fight my way out of the bedroll and face my demons. But they are gone. The sound of their march has become the knock of a piece of driftwood lodged in a narrow rock spillway of pulsing waves beating forward and rolling back dragging the log back and forth in this slotted trap. Their chant? The play of the wind among the palms and rocks. The wraiths revealed against the Pali? The moonlight drifting in and out of the thinning clouds.
A bit of beef. A blot of mustard. An underdone potato.
I am again surrounded by the soft light of the moon, which is now fully disclosed. The waves speak again o
f ancient things, processes at work for eons. I am bidden again to wonder and mystery, not of the type suggested by superstition, but that demanded by the deep occult of things existent.
It is time to look at love. I am no longer afraid. I pull the book I want to explore from my pack. It will serve as the basis of my investigation and the moon will light it. The book deserves a book-length treatment of its origins in full but I’ll sketch it only briefly.
In the summer of ‘58, I was at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill teaching badminton to young girls in several sports camps being run by the PE department. It was to last over the course of the summer. During my time there I decided to sign up for a graduate course in writing poetry. The class itself was a waste of time (the teacher was a model of affectation and theatrics and the students were more inclined to snicker at his poetic recitations than be moved by them). The students, however, formed a cadre of fellows that made the summer delightful. There were students from multiple disciplines like the biologist who gave me the ‘haunted inn’ piece above, historians, students in English, and some from religion. I will not name them (there was one whose name you would recognize if you’ve followed American poetry). Quite the band of merry bards were we.
Gilda Trillim Page 18
