Gilda Trillim

by Steven L. Peck

gesture came through and all were content

  to sit and ponder their separation and their reuniting.

  At this moment. On this night. Each alone and each

  together, bound by bonds of old magic and power

  that not one of them understood nor even wanted to,

  as they bathed in the darkness and the light

  remembering and forgetting.

  It is the second night. To get to the end of this rocky promontory, I passed a line of squat and stunted palms, ragged and unkempt. Not like the tall and stately palms that line Southern Californian boulevards. The fronds are stringy and torn, displaying a wildness like some ancient forest hermit, bearded with tangled rattan stripped from the fibrous bark. Woven in the nest-like mess found at the base of the leaves, debris from the wind gathers, adding to a bedding structure that guard the gargantuan floating seeds provisioned with their own milky supply of fresh water. Around the trees, sun-bleached coconuts are scattered haphazardly about—a few have leaked a phallic root probing the sand for anchorage.

  I walk carefully over the rocks to the end of the jetty and find a flat rock to act as a seat. My lap is my desk. Tonight I want to ponder objects again. To explore the old questions that interested me before the disruption that stole so much from me and replaced my ruminations with jagged scars and unhealing wounds.

  That past must be set aside for a time. Stoically, perhaps, but I must seize again old puzzles. What is it to be an object? How do things connect? I fear everything must be repackaged in light of things my mind or my heart now wants to orbit. Twice now in vision, love has pushed itself forward as the first principle of concern. First in my vision of the cosmos, and second with my vision of Heavenly Mother. I don’t know if I’ve gained insight into the outer world or inner, or if there is a difference, but I seem to be being led, either by my brain or the universe—it’s hard to say which, for it is hard to escape the old quandary of whether the world wheels in freedom or by fixed determination—if these experiences are immanent or transcendent.

  I open my gambit with the moon. I look up and see its face. I know light waves are bouncing off its surface from the sun, disclosing the presence of this object that lies 238,900 miles from the earth.1 I learn more by seeing the variation in color and texture. I see craters and I have explanations as to why they form, giving me a hint that whatever the moon is, it is craterizable. Recently, a few men have visited there and brought back rocks that reveal more about its rocky surface.

  I also look out over the ocean and consider the rise and fall of tides swaying according to the moon’s pleasure. Yet much of this immense sea remains masked. Like the apple seed I so long labored over that I tried to trick into revealing its nature, yet as always some part remains hidden. As Heraclitus says, “Nature tends to hide itself.”2 I wonder if the only way to understand the moon (or an apple seed) fully is to be that thing. Yet even that can’t be right. I cannot even fully uncover myself to myself, so what could the moon reveal to itself? I often surprise myself and discover myself in new ways. I understand myself no better for being conscious. Therefore as a meaty object I am a mystery to my conscious self: I cannot feel my liver livering, or my kidney kidneying. Does that mean that this thing that makes me, that binds me to cells, to organelles, to the structure of bone and flesh, runs deeper than I can feel? I don’t know what it means to be the moon or a seed. I should back up for I do not mean consciously. But I notice that things ‘feel’ other things. They interact. They touch. They react to each other, like the items in my study of junk drawer ecology.

  So it seems like a thing-in-itself is not revealed even to itself, but only in relation to other things. Alone an object or a thing is nothing. A moon in a universe that held only a moon would not be there. It would have no properties until it related to other things, things that, relating, give it size, structure, and all the rest. The moon is revealed by the light of the sun, by the pull of the earth, by the foot that walks and leaves footprints in the dust. And I similarly find myself manifest by the moon and its shine. By the relations in which I stand—by rocks and ancient lava, by the photonic absorption of the light of thousands of stars, by the sound of the ocean splashing against the shore, by opihi and its shell, by the sedges and sparse plants pushing through grains of sands, by the relationship of those plants and the sand as individual grains and individual plants and their shells, by the birds which pipe on the shore and their feathers which fall on the ground and are washed to shore from the sea and that gather with other detritus forming bands of debris of which that feather is but a piece of the structure that traps the foam of the sea, upon which small fleas dance and play and capture meager nutrients created by bacteria decomposing that debris with patience and relentless acts of decay, and by the palms which create shade and places where certain molds can form that create spaces for newer sanctuaries from which to launch new plants and plant systems into the world. Here I stand in relation to an infinity of other objects and an infinity of relationships of objects to one another, which create new objects like the waves created by moon and ocean which structure and mold other objects and on and on and on. Is there so much of me that like Whitman I can claim I am multitudes? How can such a small person stretch out and reach myriads of infinities upon infinities? How is their room for all those relationships? How can I hold so much? To be me must take infinite work as relationships compound into more connections than I can fathom. It cannot be conscious, of course, because even my neurons are part of a deeper structure—pieces of chemicals, the relation of brain states formed by some flicker dispatched from, say, a fly that happens to skip past my eye, which in turn launches a cascade of neuronal triggers that cause my eye to blink. An event that signifies nothing but a random event, most of which must be ignored or perish in trying to actively attend to everything. There is too much for that. My brain must be selective.

  And so I let go. I cannot hold it all so I let go. I let the moon bathe me in its light and let the sound of the waves wash over me and feel the fresh breeze play upon the palms and rocks and cry and careen through objects. I integrate these into a feeling of peace and enjoy the flavor of the objects around me and suddenly I am no more multitudes but am one thing, a unit, a moment. I take in a breath and sense that the tangle and bundle that I am melts away into a puddle of one. I am suddenly a gift to myself. I am not bracketing out questions of what defines me but bracketing in a wholeness, a stitching. I do not want to say I’m ‘one’ like some Siddhartha for I’m not. I am still many, but I’ve come to be a togetherness. A unity, not a oneness. Like wine aged into one flavor. Its parts can be separated, but its flavor is unified and coherent despite the multitudes it contains. Or, more crassly, the corkscrew that pulled the cork, a device that comes together to form a simple machine, created by combining machines like the wedge and lever to create a new thing that in its unity relates to the wine in specific ways. A community. An ecology. An inhabitant of a universe of objects, uses, relationships, creating novelty and hope. And there it is! A new object. Perhaps every object is just a confederation among other objects. Objects are just connections coming together in a community of interrelationship. Relations all the way down. Can you think of a single counter example?

  Where of love then? Tomorrow. My sleeping bag is calling me to its folds.

  Later

  They showed up about noon. I had just taken a pleasant swim in my miniature private lagoon. I was sunbathing naked on the beach when, thankfully, I heard them approaching from a long way off because they were arguing about something. I hurriedly dressed. When they walked into camp, I greeted them cordially enough. They were as friendly as a couple of Labrador retrievers. She had sandy blonde hair curled in the humidity and was wearing a yellow flowered bikini top, cut off Levis, a straw cowboy hat, and some expensive hiking boots. The woman was also tall, tanned, and athletic. He was rather more nondescript, rotund, wearing gym shorts and sneakers. His hair was long, dark brown down to his shoulders. He had a sh
ort beard.

  They plopped their packs down by a rock near the shore and he introduced them both with, “Hi I’m Mikey and this is my old lady, Judy.”

  She was bending down to fish out their canteens, but popped up long enough to wave. I intentionally waved back with my stub, startling them for a second, but they seemed not to be bothered otherwise. He told me that they had come down through the Kau Desert. I said nothing about my route. They were hiking all the way to Hilo through Puna. I tried not to let my disappointment show.

  “We heard there was water here and thought we would stop for a few days.”

  This was supposed to be a time of solitude. This was a time to reflect and sort things out that had been confused for a long time. In our short conversation I had learned enough about them to know I had no desire to spend time with them and I was feeling desperate so I flat out lied, “Yeah, I heard the same, but it’s all dried up … supposed to be over there by the trees, but I can’t find it.”

  I was pointing in the opposite direction from the water. The water was hidden in a small cave a few hundred meters westward and even with the detailed directions I’d been given it had been genuinely hard to find. The entrance was masked by some fairly thick shrubby and if I hadn’t noticed birds coming out of it I might never have found it. The water was brackish, but serviceable.

  “Damn! These islanders are always filling us with shit. They say one thing and it turns out that it just ain’t so. Especially when going to somewhere they want left alone. They want to keep it for themselves. About fifty-million times we’ve been told something and it’s crap. They were probably hoping we would die out here.”

  “Oh, I doubt that.” I said, although thinking, who could blame them? This was quite a pair. Given their equipment they were rich and given their accents they were from New England. A perfect combination to get snowed. The irony being that this time they had not been led astray by Islanders but by the haole they automatically assumed was on their side.

  “Well we started with three canteens apiece and still have got a full one each, so we’ve got enough to make it to the Chain of Craters Road tomorrow. We’ll have to hitch a ride to the Park and fill up there. How are you fixed for water?”

  I smiled and said I had enough to get by.

  I showed them another camp about fifty yards from mine, identifiable by a ring of stones, but not protected from the wind by the remnant wall of a Heiau like mine.

  I went for a walk. Looking for shells and just wanting to be alone. I felt guilty for lying to them about the water, but not contrite enough to want to spend two or three days with them. When I got back they were boiling dehydrated backpacking meals in seawater. Eggs and stroganoff. I was not going to tell them about the opihi. It seemed like the knowledge had been given to me as a trust. I was not going to betray it.

  Looking back I feel miserable. They were not bad people. Generous. Talkative. But to me they were intruders. Corsairs of solitude. It made me combative and ornery.

  The rest of the day I mostly avoided them. I went for a walk toward the Pali, an escarpment that rose from the coastal areas up toward Mauna Loa. I got back in time to watch the sun set, nothing spectacular, but nice. In Hawaii, I suppose because of its tropical latitudes, it gets dark quickly and when I returned to my camp, the backpackers had a roaring fire going. He was playing a ukulele he pulled from who-knows-where and they were singing some songs. For a moment I was annoyed, because I enjoy the silences of the wilderness, but I soon noticed that they were not that bad. Actually, they were pretty good and were pulling off some lovely Richard and Karen Carpenter-like harmonies. I listened while I got my own fire started and found myself softly singing along. Just as my fire was starting to reach a respectable burn, Judy came over.

  “Hey,” she said. “We’ve got plenty of lasagna, we actually made three of the packets, just in case you wanted to join us. No worries if you want to be alone, we just wanted to offer … you know, in case …”

  I resigned myself to their company, “Sure. Why not?”

  Mikey gave me a royal welcome and made a place on a driftwood log they had pulled out of the surf just past the lagoon where it had been wedged among some boulders channeling the waves into a nook that held a small debris trap. I sat across from them with the fire between us, but they had kept the blaze small so that it was not inconvenient to interact with them across the flame. I remember our camps in Wyoming were usually graced with a fire half a person high and you would have to stand if you wanted to engage the person across the flames from you.

  He kept playing while Judy made us paper plates piled with freeze-dried pasta—it had to be more than three packets—along with some freeze-dried corn. We all sat on the extempore benches and ate in silence. It took me a bit of balance and maneuvering to situate the plate on my lap in a way it was secure, and then use my left hand to eat with a small plastic fork. I’d left my mechanical hook in the car, not realizing I’d have to dine with company out here, so I felt like quite the spectacle. They were polite and said nothing as they watched my dinner-dance, my posture maneuvering and making endless adjustments with my stump designed to keep my plate from being upended. I managed. When it was over, we tossed our ware into the fire and watched the remains blacken, then burst into flames.

  We sat for a while in a comfortable silence, then he reached into his pack and pulled out a pipe. The bowl was ceramic and the shaft, a cork-covered steel. He held it up and said, “OK if we smoke this?” I gave him an assenting shrug with a wave of my hand and said, “It’s cool.”

  He loaded the pipe from a baggie and lit it with the flame from a twig. After puffing it to life he took a long hit and handed it to Judy and she did the same. She held it out to me and holding her breath hoarsed out, “It’s local. Puna Fire. Want to try it?” Then she exhaled a thick bluish tinted fog.

  I’d not smoked pot since high school and since my last experience with a hallucinogenic had cost me my hand, getting high in the presence of a burning flame was not something my nervous system would let me get away with. Still, there was a slight temptation, but something inside me beat it down fairly quickly. I said, “I gave it up … I’m fine … so you two enjoy.”

  The pipe was back in Mikey’s hand and he raised it to me in salute, as if both acknowledging and honoring my choice. They smoked it quietly, like me, watching the fire. Finally, he took a long draw, and then curled his fingers around the bowl making a funnel, and blew hard into his hand-fashioned trumpet, forcing abundant smoke out of the stem. Judy put her face over the smoke and breathed it in deeply trying to catch it all through her nose and mouth. She tried to supercharge him but he came up coughing, “It’s all resin, babe.”

  They stared at the fire a while. Judy then said, “Wow. That was some gooood Shizzz.”

  He answered, “Wow. It’s like … Wow.”

  “Puna Fire.”

  “Yeah, Puna Fire.”

  “Good Shiizz.”

  “Fine, Puna Fire. Better than that Maui Wowie.”

  This went on for a while until it turned into a similar commentary on the stars, on the waves, and on the island.

  “Fine Island.”

  “Wow, really fine Island.”

  “Yeah, fine Big Island.”

  They started giggling and things until I figured I’d best go. I stood up to leave, when Mikey said, “So, sorry, we didn’t mean to leave you out. What snacks have you got out here? We packed light and forgot munchies, just the meals. It’s all that freeze dried crap.”

  I explained my provisions were not much better. Mikey looked disappointed, but just shrugged, “OK, sit down and listen to this wild story we heard from the guy who like sold us this shizz.”

  Judy giggled. “Mikey, tell her that story. It will freak you out to the max.”

  Mikey was watching the waves from the surf roll in with a strange look on his face, like he had to keep an eye out for things, “You tell her, babe, but tell her it is creepy so watch out.”

/>   “It’s creepy.”

  I have to admit I was curious. For they no longer seemed to think everything was funny. My two stoners seemed unnerved and watchful, even as high as they obviously were.

  “Go ahead, I’ll listen.”

  “OK but remember, man, you are going to be creeped out.”

  “Creeped out to the max.”

  “So creepy.”

  “Yeah, uber creepy.”

  “OK, what happened?”

  “Well, like the dude who sold us the weed, said that this was like true. It happened to his mother when she was like a little girl.”

  “Yeah, like a little kid girl.”

  So you get the idea. This story went on with constant interruptions between the two of them. Many distractions and asides. Several attempts to find something to eat in their packs and finally eating some nuts and raisins that I finally gave in and provided. There was a growing spookiness that had them almost cringing and whining in fear at one time, but in the end I had the story. It was creepy. I’ll tell it straight not as I heard it from the scattered and tossed fragments they offered.

  It goes something like this:

  The grower who cultivated my friends’ pot was from an old Hawaiian family. One of the Ali’i, the rulers, and had married pretty much along those lines so that he had claims to the line of chiefs. His mother told him how when she was a little girl, her very pregnant mother one day started screaming and ordered her to go get her father. She never forgot the puddle of strange smelling fluid between her mother’s legs. She ran like a reef dart down to the cane fields where her father was a foreman for one of the sugar bosses. He had a horse and they climbed aboard and galloped for their home. When they got there, the mother was passed out limp on the floor. Her belly was sunken. A bloody mess was splashed all around her legs and waist. And most eerie and strange, a slime trail leading out of the house shone in the morning sun sparkling. They awakened the woman. She screamed and bawled and they could get nothing sensible from her. She was weak and shaking and finally whispered, “My son has gone down to find his ohana.” At that moment, her auntie showed up so the pot grower’s mother and her father started to track the queer slime trail through the shrubs and grasses. It led through the ‘akoko to the strand and there on the black sand beach was a small shark flopping and flipping toward the shoreline. They ran toward it, still following the silvery trail that they had followed from their house. When they got to the baby shark it was exhausted, its dry gills working slowly in immediate distress. Her father picked up the shark and rushed it into the surf. He cradled it in his hands moving it through the water, spinning it in small circles until it regained its strength and skittered away. The pot grower’s grandfather watched a long time, waist deep in the gentle surf. He turned to come back when the little girl saw the terrifying dorsal fin of a great white roaring toward him from behind. The little girl screamed and pointed and the man turned around and saw what was coming and rather than run, turned to face it. She saw the treacherous beast open its mouth but stop before her father. After a moment the beast turned around and fled the reef toward the open ocean. Her father slogged forward and fell on his knees and offered a prayer to Heavenly Father for his wife’s deliverance, for the Melchizedek Priesthood, and that he was in the tribe of Manasseh, and of the sharks. Then he turned to the little girl, “You need never fear the sharks, your little brother will protect you. He is a shark and you are ohana.”