(July-September 2024.) An introductory post for a series of writings on my 5 week adventure hitchhiking around the Big Island of Hawai’i in April & May 2024. It’s meant to address the most important things I learned during my time on the island. It features 3 sections: Why Hawai’i, Hitchin’, and The New World. “Why Hawai’i” explains why I came to the island; I discuss the internal logic of my explorations of all 50 states, as well as the unique history of Hawai’i that sets it apart from the other 49 states. “Hitchin’” surveys my experience hitchhiking and the big takeaways from my time on the island— interesting things I learned about the land, culture, and local language. Finally, “The New World” explores the Big Island of Hawai’i as a sort of symbol, metaphor, or synecdoche for the idea of the ‘New World’; this comparison, and what I learn from it, carries massive implications for our own New World here in America, on land once known as Turtle Island. This last piece is my favorite.
The future Hawai’i Notebooks will feature a few short notebook entries, like ‘Some Mornings,’ and many longer adventure stories about some of my best experiences on the island, like ‘Hitching to the Top of the World’ and ‘At the Edge of a Volcano.’ The planned pieces are as follows, and will be linked here as they’re posted:
0. Introduction
1. Crashing Out
2. Oceanic Context
3. Some Mornings
4. Quest for the Heart of the Island— Part 1
5. Hitching to the Top of the World
6. At the Edge of a Volcano
7. Place of Refuge
8. Quest for the Heart of the Island— Part 2
9. Big Island Poems
10. The Map
The Hawai’i Notebooks: Introduction
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Why Hawai’i
I’ve long known that my quest to understand America as deeply as possible requires me to visit all 50 U.S. states. For a variety of reasons, I always knew Hawai’i would be last. It was, of course, the 50th state added to the Union. I finished the last of the Lower 48 contiguous U.S. states in Fall 2022 (with Wisconsin as 48!); then, 2023 was all about getting to Alaska by any means necessary, and I reached Hyder that September. Going into 2024, Hawai’i was the final mission I had to complete before returning to school triumphant this fall after 5+ years of adventures.
Another reason to save Hawai’i for last comes from a sort of internal logic to my adventures, which follows the natural poetry of America itself. Walt Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass Preface, in which he prophesied what the ideal American poet must do, is never far from my mind when thinking about the Great American Novel Project: “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.” The essence of poetry is in the way parts relate to a larger whole; the way individual lines relate to a poem is similar to the way that Arkansas, Long Island, Lake Superior, San Francisco, and the Mississippi River relate to the beautiful abstraction we call America. The country itself was already a poem long before there were poets here to put it into words: the shapes of the mountains, the voices of the rivers flowing down, the contours of the coastlines, the patterns of humans and trees and birdsongs filling the vastness are all unrhymed poetry.
I often imagine what a similarly adventurous young man, born and raised on the shores of Mount Hope Bay just as I was, would do if he were born in 1400 or 1800 or 1900. With souls that craved exploration westward from our sunrise shore, these Aidans of other times would have been able to walk across the continent just like I can today. They could walk the seaboard and Appalachia, could follow the central rivers Ohio, Mississippi, Missouri, could cross the Rockies in summer and the desert in fall, could surmount the final crest of the Sierras and reach the promised land in California. Feet have traveled further. Heck, these intrepid versions of myself from past times could have even walked their way up the lush Pacific Coast in the summertime until they reached the southern parts of Alaska. Likely? No. But conceivable? Yes. And conceivable is all the imagination needs.
But Hawai’i is fundamentally different. Unless we stretch our imaginations, the Wampanoag version of Aidan from 1400 would probably never reach Hawai’i. Perhaps the 1800 version of Aidan could, but it certainly wouldn’t be on foot, and the Hawai’i he found by long voyage would have very little to do with his notions of ‘America’. He would find a sovereign nation, completely foreign, separated by thousands of miles of ocean from the North American continent. Yet, by the accidents and crimes of history, this faraway island chain is now irrevocably entangled with this thing we call ‘America.’ Hawai’i has its own stanza in the great American poem, despite being geographically disconnected. How does this new verse fit in? What does it mean? And what does it mean America is, that it can stretch across an ocean— that, while it is elastically tethered to the continent once called Turtle Island, it is not bound by it?
I have an insatiable desire to explore the whole world, but I restricted my initial focus to a specific quest first: I decided I had to see all 50 states before I could go explore other countries (Canada on the way to Hyder being the only exception, as well as Puerto Rico, which, like Hawai’i, is both sort of American and sort of its own thing). The idea was to progressively spiral outwards in my explorations, to start with what’s most naturally accessible, to gradually ratchet up the novelty and difficulty, to constrain the experiment and maximize my “Americanness” first rather than randomly teleport all over willy-nilly. This was part of the experiment of the Great American Novel Project; what if I focused first on knowing America with minimal influence on my experience from elsewhere, sort of isolated the variable in a scientific sense? Then, I could bring this distinctively American sensibility into contact with every other country on Earth, progressively outwards, a sort of metaphor for the globalization of America, the first country which explicitly welcomes people from every country, and thus the first national identity consciously in dialogue with every other national identity. Hawai’i, more than any other state, represents this sort of liminal space between continental America and global America, and thus it seemed fitting to me as my sort of ‘graduation’ from this classical phase of the Great American Novel Project. It’s a state that is both American and foreign, national and international. It’s a gateway between my adventures in just the U.S. and my future adventures around the world. Hawai’i is, fundamentally, a port— the hub of the Pacific. One positive impact of the unique international legacy of Hawai’i is that Hawai’i is the most racially diverse state in the country— 37% Asian, 21% White, 10% Pacific Islander, 10% Hispanic, the rest all mixed (44% of marriages there are interracial.) But, of course, the islands are not just the international American dream settled in paradise; there is a negative side to the port legacy of Hawai’i, and that is of course the legacy of imperialism, theft, and the blatant overthrow of Hawaiian sovereignty.
This last problem is another major factor I considered in saving Hawai’i for last. Given the colonial legacy, to visit Hawai’i brings up questions of politics, morals, and respect. While a majority of Hawaiians welcome visitors in various ways, there is a minority that wishes to significantly curb or even eliminate visitation. This minority has very vocal allies in certain internet circles, who Tweet that visiting Hawai’i is verboten. This worried me; should I even go? On the mainland, I’ve made friends with both Native Hawaiians and born-and-raised Hawaiian locals; I asked them what I should do. They all told me that I would be welcomed on the islands with the aloha spirit as long as I treat the residents and land with respect. The main problem, they said, was when outsiders came and mistreated the land and its people: entitled tourists littering and consuming, the military poisoning the island’s water, corporations commodifying and damaging the land. But a genuine visitor, they said, someone there to contribute and enter into an authentic relationship with the island and its people— someone willing to listen to the locals, listen to the land, and learn to live in harmony with the garden already there— this kind of visitor is as welcome in Hawai’i as anywhere else on Earth. Hearing this was freeing to me; while hyper-online mainlanders in weird moral signaling competitions may condemn anybody visiting the islands as an inherently evil imperialist, most people actually from Hawai’i have a more nuanced opinion. It’s not a matter of simply coming or not coming; after all, if no life ever came to Hawai’i from somewhere else, there would be nothing ‘native’ there— it would still be lifeless black lava rock floating on the ocean. It’s more about how you come, and the way you weave yourself into the web of relationships there.
~
Hitchin’
So, I decided to go. I knew I just wanted to explore one island at a time, and that I wanted to start with the Big Island, the wildest and youngest island. I flew to the Big Island (also called Hawai’i Island) on April 19th, and left five weeks later on May 23rd. During those five weeks I had one of the greatest adventures of my life, hitchhiking around this one big little island, learning its contours and culture. I stealth camped in beautiful places. I slept at a few hostels, but more often I stayed with local friends I made. I couchsurfed. I weeded gardens and cleaned gutters in exchange for free beds. I lived minimally while adventuring maximally. In total, including all forms of currency, I spent about $1200 the whole time I was there, mostly on food, which is extra expensive on the island. Throw in the plane ticket there and back, and that brings the total cost of one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had to about $1700 for 5 weeks. In a world of expensive tourism, hotels, and consumers who think they need to spend a lot of money to enjoy themselves, I’m very proud of what I accomplished with so little money. But of course, what interests me most is not the price of adventure, but the experiences I had. I truly believe that I had a more exciting experience in Hawai’i doing it my own way than anyone could ever pay for in a traditional manner. Living like a hitchhiker was the adventure, and I don’t think I would have preferred a purchased, packaged experience. By riding with locals and living with the land, I got to know the island way more intimately than any tourist in a resort would.
One of the things I’ve always loved about hitchhiking is that, everywhere you go, you arrive with a local. You need the locals: they pick you up, get you where you need to go, give you advice and recommendations, tell you the things they don’t tell other outsiders; they offer you a couch or tell you the best place to camp nearby; they connect you with other locals who can help you on your quest. When you’re a hitchhiker, you’re on the ground; you’re live, on the scene, in the moment; you’re inextricably connected with the people, the land, the flow of the day to day in that particular place. You become more truly a part of that place while you’re there. Hitchhiking 20,000 miles around the American mainland taught me the value of hitching with locals; but, until Hawai’i, I never realized how far this power could go. After all, my previous hitchhiking adventures were all one-way trips: around the country in 2017, around New England and upstate New York in 2018, across the west from LA to Montana in 2019, then cross country in both 2021 and 2022. While I definitely got lots of insider info about the places I went on those trips, I never stuck around too long in any one place. But spending 5 weeks in hitchhiker mode exploring a single island no more than 93 miles long and 76 miles wide is another vibe entirely. With 5 weeks hitchhiking around this one area, I was able to explore and integrate a place on a level I’d never known possible.
The map of the Big Island is indelibly impressed into my mind forever: I can not only picture the layout of the island— its roads, its towns, its rainforests, its coasts, its deserts, its five great volcanoes— but I can feel them. I can imagine how it felt to be there. I can hitch in my mind along the dry Kohala coast and up around Kamehameha’s birthplace to lush Pololu, across the High Road from Waimea to Kona, across the Saddle Road between Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa to Hilo, around the hippie heavens hidden in the rainforests of Puna with cacophanies of coquis, over Kilauea and around the southern tip back by Hualalai, or along the perfect Hamakua coast towards sacred Waipi’o. I can feel in my soul how the rainclouds always come over the ocean from the east, and how the different mountains cause the rain to descend to wet rainforests on their eastern slopes while casting dry shadows to their west. To my mind there is no more perfect microcosm of planet earth than the Big Island of Hawai’i; not only is it the newest land in the world atop one of its most active hot spots, but it also features eight of the thirteen total kinds of biomes available on this whole planet. (I will discuss the beauty and resonance of the map more in Hawai’i Notebook #10— Big Island: The Map.)
When you’re a hitchhiker, you become a sponge. You have to; getting along with your driver is your survival mechanism. Whenever I hitchhike through the Southern United States, even for a few days, I develop a slight southern accent. Nothing fake, nothing done on purpose, just a slight slowing of my northern speech, a settling into the sound of the people around me. It’s a natural thing that happens when you hitchhike somewhere new; everyone who picks you up leaves a little mark on you, too. Hitchhiking forces you to soften the boundaries of the self. The price of openness is that you’re always changing. And, because I spent more time hitchhiking in Hawai’i than in any other state, I changed more there, adopted the vibe of the island more deeply than I ever imagined.
For example, the shaka symbol is now an integral part of how I communicate with the world. The shaka is the ‘pinky and thumb out, middle three fingers down’ hand gesture you may have seen surfers display in movies. It’s often thrown with a slight twist of the wrist. It’s a pretty universally useful gesture: it can mean “aloha,” “hi/bye,” “thank you,” “hang loose,” “take it easy,” “right on,” or “things are good.” It can be a form of greeting, recognition, assent, affirmation, encouragement— anything that keeps the vibes good, binds us together, reminds us all that life is great and that we’re all in it together. When you think about it, so much of our nonverbal communication intends to convey exactly those things, since so much of our communication is more about binding us together than sharing specific information— phatic communication versus ideational communication. The shaka can replace the thumbs-up, the O.K., the wave, the salute, the solidarity-fist, the handshake. But of course, it carries extra cultural vibes on top of these— the vibe of the islands, of warm wind and waves, of another beautiful day in paradise— one angel greeting another, surprised and pleased to find ourselves here, together, free, sharing the secret in the ease of the promised land.
My friend Ikaika, who helped me build my bus ceiling in summer 2022 in Colorado, is a Hawaiian Native; we linked up in Hilo for burgers and beer. He taught me that, growing up in Hawai’i, the looser your shaka was, the cooler you were. This makes sense; American kids all over have different signifiers of coolness, but ease, casualness, looseness are qualities that seem to be cool no matter what they’re applied to. So, a cool Hawaiian throws the loose shaka; middle fingers not squeezed all the way to the palm, thumb and pinky loosely out but not fully extended. You need not twist the wrist all the way around, or tense any muscles beyond the minimum indication— a tense, extended, energetic shaka is a sure sign of a tourist. While I was hitchhiking around the island, I’d throw a loose shaka sometimes with one hand while my thumb was out from the other: a way to wave down tourists and locals alike, doubly animated, doubly calling attention to my need for a ride. One rule of hitchhiking is that the more you move, the more animated you are, the more likely you are to get a ride. Drivers are like Tyrannosaurus Rex’s; they only really see movement.
I started using the shaka for everything, and it became muscle memory, a default mode of interaction with the world. I brought it back to the mainland with me, and since it’s been 4 months since I left Hawai’i, I’m starting to think the loose shaka is permanently ingrained in my personality. I shaka before I jump off a cliff, shaka when I let someone cut in front of me on the road, shaka to the kids pointing at my cool bus, shaka when I leave the checkout register, shaka when I take a posed picture, shaka when I share a sweet moment of acknowledgement and eye contact with someone cool hiking the same trail. The shaka has successfully replaced most of my other previously-used nonverbal gestures; you might say it is a more successful species of gesture, outcompeting and replacing weaker symbols like the “O.K.” I don’t mind. Whenever and wherever I shaka, whether it’s driving my bus through San Francisco or OneWheeling through the desert at Burning Man, I bring the soft crash of the bluest waves with me. I bring a piece of Hawai’i with me. I represent an integral part of myself, and make it feel at home everywhere.
The local Hawaiians often speak a dialect of English, Pidgin Hawaiian, so different from standard American English that it sometimes sounds like its own language. It is a beautiful and unique language, a sort of Creole English made up of a mishmash of English, Native (Olelo) Hawaiian, Japanese, Portuguese, Cantonese, Spanish, Filipino, and more— this is a legacy of the sugar plantations, where diverse immigrants to the islands from all over the world had to learn to communicate with one another. In this sense, as a linguistic mutt, Hawaiian Pidgin is a true language of the New World, a common denominator bridge between peoples who originated from all over the globe. In a sense, all language is this attempt to bridge the gap between fundamentally foreign individuals, to attempt to share experiences and understand one another in a simplified meeting-place across our inescapable differences. To hear a group of longtime locals hanging out, ‘talkin’ story,’ in their language is to witness something special, something real. It is on the decline, especially near the developed tourist areas, but you’ll know you’ve found the real Hawai’i when you’re hanging out on the lanai with some kane and wahine, enjoying pau hana, sharing some ono grindz, talkin’ story; you might not understand all of it at first, but you’ll get small kine.
‘Da kine’ is the phrase at the heart of Hawaiian Pidgin. It comes from ‘the kind’; Hawaiians often use the word ‘kine’ to allude to something obliquely, to get at what they mean from a sideways angle, to identify something by means of an abstraction, quality, or characteristic. It often can be used like English’s ‘kind,’ ‘kind of,’ or ‘type’: “he’s smart kine people,” “they know all kine,” “it’s peach kine fruit.” But ‘da kine’ is the next level of abstraction. Hawaiians use ‘da kine’ as a catch-all filler-word, something that can mean anything. You have to figure out what it means by context clues. It’s been called “the keystone of pidgin. You can use it anywhere, anytime, anyhow.” It’s “the word you use when you don’t use the word.” It “can have any kine connotation depends on how you say um and who you say um wit.” It indicates something unsaid; it points to a lacuna, attempts to communicate something you don’t have the right word for. So, you can say “I talked with da kine on da kine last night about how Auntie was being so da kine.” Because you share a context with the other speaker, they know that you mean “I talked with Kailuani on the phone last night about how Auntie was being so mean,” without having to get too specific. It allows the process of communication to take place more in the associative mind of the listener, gives them space to fill in the gaps, kind of like how a good line of poetry is not just about what is said but what is unsaid, what the mind of the reader is able to imagine for themselves off of what’s given. It reminds one of Hemingway’s philosophy of writing-as-an-iceberg, using minimal language to convey maximum hidden meanings. When a local speaker is trying to describe something they don’t have all the words for, they will often use ‘da kine’ liberally, sprinkling it across a sentence, in an attempt to triangulate some meaning they’re grasping after. It’s kind of like how Gen Z Americans frequently use the word ‘like’ in an attempt to convey meaning without the embarrassment of declaring a too-specific definition, implying this fundamental understanding of the world of meaning as a shifty, imperfect thing impossible to pin down fully. It’s an acknowledgement of and adaptation to the limits of language. Everything in language is ‘like’ a lot of other things, is a product of these abstract axes of likeness, is a fluid referent of nested contexts. All words are da kine. Everything is da kine. It is quite possibly the most versatile phrase in da kine language, and the one which most gets at the essence of language itself.
Other Hawaiian slang words can be really useful, too, can convey certain kine things well that American English cannot. A great example is the Hawaiian greeting ‘Howzit.’ Howzit is short for ‘How’s it going?’ As a hitchhiker navigating Hawai’i, a casual ‘howzit?’ when I approached a local was always met with positivity, because I sounded like one of them; it helped me learn the best spot for poke, get help from an employee at a store, learn the back way in to a place tourists aren’t allowed. It’s honestly just better than ‘How’s it going?’ from a linguistic perspective; you get the exact same message across with two syllables rather than four. In returning to the mainland, I’ve had to consciously stop myself from saying howzit when I greet someone, because it’s become so ingrained in my mind. I wish we could all just agree to replace ‘How’s it going?’ with ‘Howzit?’
Another example is that Hawaiians call their neighbors, family, friends, and anyone older than them ‘auntie,’ ‘unko’ (uncle), and ‘bruddah’ or ‘brah’ (brother). I like this, because it makes everyone family, everyone ‘ohana. I loved riding the bus, hearing the bus driver asking the regular rider ‘Goin to da store again, auntie?’
Hawaiian slang also provides useful orientation on an island formed by volcanoes. There are two fundamental directions on the island: ‘mauka’ (towards the mountain) and ‘makai’ (towards the sea). When giving directions, you say ‘at the intersection, turn mauka.’ It is a place-based, objective orientation, not a confusing subjective orientation like left and right which change depending on the speaker’s position. The mountains are always uphill; the water, always downhill. I like the phenomenology of a life lived between the mountains and the sea. Hawaiian slang implies the island, is inextricable from the land and its people.
I learned so much on the Big Island. I learned the story of Kamehameha the Great, one of the most interesting human beings who ever lived, a larger-than-life hero who united the islands. A movie, anime, or TV show about his life would rock the world. I learned about the goddess Pele. I learned about algae and coral, about surfing and snorkeling. I learned about spinner dolphins and about the cultivation of fish ponds. I learned about the different kinds of lava. I learned the names of more kinds of fruit than I ever knew existed. I learned about koa wood and the wonder that is grocery store poke (Foodland is the best). I learned about the eruption of 2018 and how it fundamentally altered the landscape of Puna. I learned about the death of Captain Cook and the illegal overthrow of the Queen. I learned about the ali’i and taboos and the Place of Refuge. I learned that Hilo is the rainiest city in the United States and that Kona is basically California. I learned that a movie about Honoka’a taught millions in Japan about the wonders of Hawai’i. I learned that Mark Twain planted a monkeypod tree not too far from one of the only green sand beaches in the world at the southernmost point in the United States. I learned you can build your own home on lush rainforest land in Puna, catch your own rainwater, and live off the abundance of the land (as long as you learn to avoid the brain-eating rat lungworm, and all the Punatics in witness protection growing pakalolo). I learned where the best waterfalls were, the ones the tourists don’t visit. I learned that the greatest stars in the world can be seen from the top of Mauna Kea, and that Hawai’i is the only place in the United States you can see the Southern Cross.
But the most important thing I learned on the Big Island is how genuinely kind the local Hawaiian people are. The aloha spirit is real. If you approach Hawaiians with the aloha spirit yourself, you will discover hospitality unlike anything I’ve seen on the mainland. They take care of one another, and if you really embrace the culture, they will take care of you too. As a result, hitchhiking in the Big Island was easier and more fun than anywhere I’ve ever hitched on the mainland.
I love hitchhiking more than just about anything in the world. It’s something I’m good at, and something that’s less common these days to be good at, which makes it all the more special. It’s something that lets me explore the world more freely than any other method, something that returns me to that hunter-gatherer mentality, an engaging form of ultimate freedom that speaks to something deep in my DNA. When I’m hitching, it’s just me and my pack, my thumb and my wits— that’s all I need to cross a continent or make myself at home on an island. These skills will certainly translate to backpacking around Europe or motorcycling around South America or hitchhiking Australia. It forces self-reliance and social reliance, both in a newly conscious way; thus, it’s both individualizing and community-building. Hitchhiking is adventure with the serendipity turned to 11. It’s both a sport and it’s an art. And Big Island was the best place I’ve played this game by far (and it’s not even close).
The Big Island is easy hitchin’ for a lot of reasons: warm nights mean you can camp anywhere and not have to worry so much about where you end up; a culture that embraces hitchhiking means way more drivers per capita will pull over for you than on the mainland by an extraordinary degree. I never had to wait that long for a pickup truck to let me hop in the back and ride through the warm ocean breeze. Imagine a professional skier carving it up on a green circle bunny slope; imagine Tiger Woods playing minigolf; imagine the world’s best fisherman with a fully-stocked lake to himself. That’s what it felt exploring the Big Island as one of America’s best hitchhikers. It was easy, so I could have more fun with it; I could play around, try new things, relax my old rules, loosen my tie, try out some tricks, flex a little bit, push my limits. It’s like a jazz legend riffing around in total flow; it’s like Minecraft in creative mode rather than survival mode. I could spend all day somewhere, knowing that as long as I left by around 5 pm, I could get to literally anywhere on the island reliably by nightfall. Once I’d built up a handful of trustworthy spots to sleep around the island, I felt like I could do anything, like the entire island was my home and my playground. If I had to stay out past dark, that was no problem; I knew I’d get home. On the mainland, I could never pull that off.
~
The New World
As this is intended to be just an introduction to a series of Hawai’i stories— some shorter than this, some longer— I’ll save the rest of my thoughts for the later Notebooks. But there’s one last broad-level point I’d like to make about the Big Island from the point of view of the Great American Novel Project. The Big Island, I found, can be thought of as a sort of metaphor, symbol, or synecdoche of the New World.
The New World is an idea typically associated with the American continent, this place where the idea that we can recreate the world took hold most powerfully yet in history. But more abstractly, the New World is what happened when the world started coming together faster, this columbian exchange of boats between continents, bringing all the diversity of earth’s life into dialogue for the first time, a sort of coming-back-together of all the unique descendants of those first unicellular organisms. It’s like life itself having a high school reunion. And, of course, in the act of coming together, in the dynamic interactions of integration between parts, shit happens. Shit happens faster; the plot of the world sped up in America. It sped up wherever new peoples, new cultures, new languages, new life came into contact with one another, and in their dialogue altered each other. There was destruction, of course, lots of destruction; but lots of creation, too. It is not good or bad. It is just what happened, what always would have happened one way or another. Of course, that is not to say that we could not do better. Modernism, and then metamodernism, these cultural movements of the New World, acknowledge that we have an active role to play in the remaking of the world. In one sense, the world is always becoming new, always evolving whether we want it to or not. But the idea of the New World helped us humans come to terms with the progressive nature of reality, helped us lean into it, and become co-creators of the ever-New World. America, at its best, is an autopoietic story, and we the people are both the authors and the protagonists of the story we are writing and re-writing. In some ways, the story we write is constrained by the accidents of history; but, there is always a sense of the New World as emergent, as fundamentally new, not something that could be fully predicted by the past; something somewhat free to break from the past, to leap beyond constraints, to be surprised at the shapes reality can take.
The island of Hawai’i is the New World in miniature. In this, it is an experiment similar to America, but still fundamentally original— like a half-brother, born of the same spirit in different lands. The island is a perfect metaphor, symbol, or synechdoche for the New World in part because of its isolation, a single island in the middle of the ocean, as far as possible from any major landmass. It’s a specific example, a circle of green highlighted by blue, a constrained experiment of a mini-continent. It’s representative, in the way that the strangers on a lifeboat are representative of the population of the ship, especially since it contains a majority of Earth’s biomes and can host an incredible diversity of life-forms. It’s almost like the simulation designers put this part of the map in as an Easter Egg, a practice level, or a post-game heaven. I understand now why Stitch from Lilo & Stitch landed his rocket on Kauai— if I were floating over Earth looking for somewhere cool to land, I’d choose Hawai’i, too. It’s obvious. These just-right green dots formed by a weird hotspot in the center of earth’s largest crustplate, swimming in the center of the blue planet’s largest blue sea, are clearly Earth’s pet project. She’s squeezing lava out of the craziest hole, higher and higher each time, the source of the largest volcano on earth moving and moving and moving through the sea, stronger than the sea, forging an unfathomably tall rock wherever lava meets the cool ocean. The southeastward trail of the Hawaiian Islands is the path left by the slow movements of earth’s Pacific Plate over its most peculiar lava leak. The hotspot made Kauai 5 million years ago. But now, the hotspot has spent the last 500,000 years forming the Big Island, the newest island in the chain, a baby born a blink of a geologic eye ago, Earth’s most recent performance art project. It’s now the only still-erupting Hawaiian Island, where all the action is. It’s the most alive spot on the face of the Earth.
The Big Island of Hawai’i is thus, literally, the newest land, an island of active volcanoes erupting fresh layers of black rock year after year. It is, without need for metaphor, the New World. This does, of course, make it an attractive object of association for abstractions about the idea of the New World. All abstractions, all ideas, all poetry emanates from the hard fact of the Earth, auroras around the forms of nature. Thus we find that our words tend to rhyme with the world. A mind attuned to meaning-making would expect, then, that the still-erupting ever-newest land would have something to teach us about the past and possibilities of this human story we call the New World.
America is also a garden, where life from all over the world can be replanted. On this vast and diverse continent we call Turtle Island, life can find any kine home it needs to thrive. There are many soils, many waters, many habitats for living things to wriggle into the shape of— and, in their wriggling, living creatures carve slightly new contours back into the land. Wine grapes from the old world found California suited them even better than Italy, and the child of immigrants from Africa and India can become President of the United States. The first tree I ever climbed was the red-leafed Japanese maple, whose welcome presence popped a colorful contrast into the green canopy of my childhood home in southern Massachusetts. These transplants can be artful, can enhance the living symphony of the New World.
Yes, the idea of America is forever entangled with the idea of the Garden of Eden. But we would miss the lesson entirely to leave the association there. It is not a garden of the past we are looking for, but a garden of the future; the Eden we search for is not something preserved, but something we can cultivate. Part of cultivating the promised land does involve forms of preservation— the old-growth forests we have left deserve the utmost protection, as they are not so easily replantable. Conservation is true conservatism. But Americans too often have gotten caught up in chasing an imagined Eden of a perfect, virginal past— even when there has never been such a thing. We’re like Jay Gatsby, trying to catch the clock, reaching out for that green light across the water, grasping for a past that can never be his again— a past that was never as real as he remembers it. Or Fitzgerald himself, as Nick, thinking of the moment sailors first set eyes on the green island of Manhattan, “a fresh, green breast of the new world,” imagining man “face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” It is because of this retrograde attitude that some Americans, like Fitzgerald, “beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” But we need not beat only against the current; by accepting that the world will always warp and widen, we can learn to lean into the flow, go with the water, and make an art of our future from the course of our past.
The old Eden is unfindable, and even if we did find it, by our very contact we’d change it irrevocably; that’s what happened when the Clovis people hunted the North American megafauna to extinction 12,000 years ago, and it’s what happened when those first European sailors landed on the green New World with their dreams and unthinking pathogens. The history of contact, the history of the New World, is a history dripping with blood and violence. We cannot imagine away our context, the victories and failures of our ancestors, the environments they left us scarred with concrete. But we can imagine the Garden of the future emerging slowly from even the most wasted land. Life is incessant, and with time has reblossomed from worse decimation. The New World is a story of creation, destruction, and recreation; change is inescapable, so the pragmatic question for us is how we will change with the world. We ought to evolve in such a way as to encourage the world and ourselves to flower as widely as possible. These strong and smart hands learned to grasp the tree of life omnivorously, to hunt and gather and farm the face of the earth; by this very strength they can also be the gentle, skillful, nurturing hands of the greatest gardeners.
The island of Hawai’i is an even more representative example of the ideal of the New World than Turtle Island. It, too, is a garden, a continent in miniature with enough combinations of warmth, wind, water, and earth to host a huge amount of this planet’s diversity in one dense place. Everything can grow here; I remember waking up in the rainforest, climbing an avocado tree to grab breakfast, and supplementing it with Suriname cherries growing a short and soft barefoot walk away. The island’s singularity makes it a useful natural experiment in what a New World can be. It is the newest part of the world, the newest land of lava. 500,000 years ago, nothing lived on this sharp black rock in the sea. It is a simpler, fresher garden.
Every single living thing on Hawai’i came there from somewhere else, and relatively recently. Once upon a time, a geographical blink of an eye ago, a bird migrating from Oceania towards Alaska happened to spot a perfect little black pulloff above the water, somewhere to land and stretch one’s legs. As this little explorer scratched himself, some little living seed dropped out of their ruffled feathers into a crack in the harsh black rock of Earth’s newest skin. All species native to Hawai’i descend in flowering cascades from a few hitchhikers like that, birds and microbes and animals and humans all immigrated to this island. They were not native; they became native. Nativity is, then, not some eternal category, some unchangeable noun. Nativity is more a verb; it is something one becomes.
We become more native over time by degrees, in proportion to the depth of our genuine dialogue with a new environment. In genuine dialogue, we listen, and we participate; we find symbiosis. Nature makes itself at home. The environment changes as we change together. The garden gardens the gardener.
In dreaming of the New World together, we must believe that there are no hard lines of nativity, no categories of yes or no. Everything comes from somewhere else; everything has evolved from the same source; everything adapts. This reframe will allows us to think more pragmatically about what it means to learn to live with one another on the same boat, the same island. In cultivating the garden, it’s not about invasive versus non-invasive, or native versus non-native. What matters is harmony. What matters is how a new neighbor adapts to the ecosystem. The best way to adapt is in such a way that promotes diversity rather than hinders it, creates more than it destroys.
For example, mongoose should probably never have been introduced to the Hawaiian ecosystem. They don’t fit in well; they didn’t mean to, but by eating all the vulnerable eggs of Hawai’i’s thousands of unique birds of paradise, we lost an unspeakable and unknowable number of unique species, irreplaceable branches of the same tree we grow from. This was tragic; we should mourn the birds; we should mourn the languages we’ll never learn. But better gardeners can learn from those mistakes. And, with an appreciative eye, they can notice how lovely it is that the bright purple jacaranda blossoms on the Kona side of the Big Island. From South Africa, the jacaranda reminds me of SoCal, of violet petals on the sidewalks of L.A. in the springtime, a surreal pop of indigo technicolor that makes the world a brighter place. I believe it is good that jacarandas are part of both gardens.
Reframing nativity as a gradient does not, of course, devalue the deeper nativity of a plant or a people who have been somewhere much, much longer. Time can do nothing but bring us closer to home. Hawai’i was one of the last places that homo sapiens discovered, about as far from home as people could row, just like the Americas were about as far from home as people could walk. The Menehune made themselves at home, and then the Polynesians made themselves at home not too long ago, decimating and oppressing the Menehune. But eventually, they, too, became native, and learned to speak a language that matches the wind and the waves of Hawai’i. That language, those stories that grew a long time in this land, the ways of living that learned to work on this island have much to teach us about how to live well with the garden we find ourselves within. We ought to honor the wisdom of those who’ve been somewhere longer than ourselves in order to find our place within the long story. Hawaiians have a word, ‘kuleana’, which means a responsibility, privilege, right, or concern. For them, rights and responsibilities are two sides of the same coin. We have a kuleana to mālama ʻāina, a responsibility to honor and care for the land, to be reciprocal with the world around us. When we have become truly part of the symphony of a place, we become children of the land, kamaʻāina. Regardless of the race of their ancestors, everyone who has lived in the New World for a long time can become a child of the land.
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Coda: O’hia
Between cracks in the harsh black lava rock of the New World grows the sacred o’hia tree. It is endemic to Hawai’i; it only evolved here. It is one of the most truly native forms of life on the island, because it evolved to be the first tree that can sprout on the newest land. It moves into the blank black canvas with ease, perfectly adapted to bring life to this lifeless land, to clear the way for many green things. The o’hia make life possible upon this volcano. It is a keystone species of the island, the first friend of the fact of rock, and it blossoms in beautiful red tendrils like the lava it loves. The o’hia blossom is the most perfect image I have yet found for the New World— a natural symbol, a wordless poem. When bees kiss the o’hia blossom, they make the most delicious honey I have ever tasted. It is the sweetness of the New World.