Rock Happy in Whyee

I was sitting at a restaurant in town the other day with Peewee and Rain. Peewee was trying to decide whether he should leave Puna and go help out at his uncle's bakery in Maui.

What's wrong, ya? Peewee asked Rain.

"I smell a bait and switch. What happened to our honey?"

Rain dropped her English Muffin with sticky fingers and instead of licking them, she wiped them on her napkin.

When I tasted it, I knew why. It sure looked like a cost cutting move by management, to replace our local honey with the Chinese honey that came in five gallon pails and was poured into squirt bottles.The stuff was vile, with the ghastly sickly-sweet industrial taste of the Chinese corn syrup that had been used to adulterate it.

Peewee said "they no get get Opihikao honey no more." 

Why did that the name of that area ring a bell? 

"Shipman place on Opihikao Road. Me, Rain and Jen Rasmussen caretakers now" said Peewee.

"We take over after they find Shipman on Punalu'u Road."

So even a year after Shipman had gotten out of his late model car, slammed his expensive tie in the door just so, and then shimmied himself off the curb, so that the early morning commuters would be sure to see him hanging there, the restaurant had been buying his fragrant honey, which tasted of the Puna Coast, of eucalyptus, gardenias, coconut flowers, lilikoi, of black earth and big surf. 

Shipman's bees had been toiling long after he had hanged himself way up on Punalu'u Road. His name had never been on the label, as this was one of his gentleman's hobbies, so how was I to know?

As to not make a long story longer, the hows and whys will have to wait for another day, but the short of it is that this honey had led me to one Claude Shipman and later to Jen, Rain and Peewee.

A precipitous drop in property prices had rendered Shipman's multi-million dollar estate unsalable in 2016. Peewee and Rain had stayed on as day to day caretakers, while Jen offered her passion, charisma and love of all things bees...a veritable Winnie the Pooh as a honey consultant. 

The big, rambling makai villa, with the impluvium, the lap pool, the orchid house, the collections of Fijian war clubs and Hawaiian Koa bowls had been kept intact. 
I thought all of this was certainly worth much more than a glance, but a nonchalant shrug and a glance was all the lovely and dark maned Rain had given the pharaoh's treasure, when Shipman had tried to impress her.

My, the things Shipman had accumulated: old pictures and pewter, carved jade and ivory, ugly faced masks and books and tapestries, large yellow sperm whale teeth scored with scrimshaw, silver platters, spoons and sugar tongs, large Chinese terra-cotta jars, glazed red and placed near the edge of the lanai, that held fish and water lilies and green mats of hyacinth and so on.

These incidental and ill sorted objects that were supposed to have value....but all of it was merely borrowed from the vast store of the world's artifacts and ultimately returned to it, sold, bequeathed, lost, stolen. These objects were protected and would find another home, another thief or borrower, but in any case they would find just another overburdened custodian, until they were returned again or destroyed. They had no use beyond their being handled or looked at.

If I were a writer, I would write of the sadness of its truth: that nothing was owned. 

Shipman was merely a watchman, a menial with illusions and pretensions, buffing things, having people polish things, being careful not to break them. He had made a provision for everything as a legacy, but people do what they want. In time, it would all be sold or deaccessioned or snatched in spite of his wishes.

Now days around the estate, Peewee did the heavy lifting, Rain did the dusting and polishing and together they ran their honey business on the side. The honey enjoys a reputation about town as medicine.

The house was still in probate court because of Shipman's complex will, contending children and several ex-wives; the place gleamed it was so clean, but it was locked and empty of people, forbidding in its neatness.

Except when the likes of we three and any other motley person or persons that we felt had a story to tell were drinking up Shipman's wine cellar and gigantic liquor closet, as well as harvesting the kind buds of pakalolo from his not inconsequential organic hydroponic grow/greenhouse (another one of his gentleman's hobbies) which at one point was three times a week.

Was it a melancholy house? I wondered as I stretched out on his meticulously Peewee landscaped lanai, next to the giant Sicilian urns filled with betel nut palms, watching his imported German worker bees collect pollen and nectar from bright red hibiscus flowers.







Or was I projecting onto my own yearning, for I owned nothing?

But here it was, a monument to irrelevance, the Shipman world of supreme luxury. I had come to know more than I wanted to know about the smitten Mr. Shipman's last year. 

I knew of his gut wrenching sadness over the rejection of his amorous entreaties by one Rain Conway, formerly of Eugene Oregon, a twenty six year old winsome, inscrutable and dark maned beauty who was unattainable: too young, too wild, too innocent and too unwilling to be the captive wife of a wealthy man in his sixties on a remote hillside in the Pacific.

But the bees still buzzed and it was the predominate sound around the late owner's back forty.

So I joined the team and learned to harvest honey from Shipman's hives. Initially Jen was kind enough to show us how to split hives, which bees fed Royal Jelly to which bees to make new queens, identify the drones that went on a fertilizing flight and so much more that you are going to have to go to her website if you are considering starting an apiary. 

Jen does not wear any bee protection. No veil or beekeepers suit for her. Above, she lights up two smokers using coconut husks. Smokers are used to confuse the bees about what our pheromones are saying to them or is it what the bees' pheromones are saying to us? In any event, Jen doesn't use smokers either. Sweet reader, we are talking about approaching an area with what, a million bees and Jen said the most important part was to send out a vibe that you are there to do no harm.

Huh?

I am used to these "vibes" and such, sent from the known universe and beyond, usually knowledge heretofore unknown to mankind, that are sent only to the dudes/dudettes that as likely as not, are living in a tent in Podunk, and abound in these parts. But in this case, we are talking that if I get the vibe wrong, or even get the right vibe but it is interpreted spuriously by even 1% of a million bees, then the penalty is a possible trip to the Hilo ER. I mean don't bees swarm and shit?

So I ask Jen "let me see if I got this right, what do the bees think when a lady comes up and takes the roof off of their home and steals all the food in the pantry, that was not exactly easy to come by?" Jen said that she didn't know what the bees thought, but if you have the right intention, the bees will go about their bee business and ignore the fact that you are even there and hence cutting your ass a break. Capiche?

As I was the only guy in this group of beekeeping women learning all of this, and there was only one bee suit, I didn't want to appear too much of a pussy, so off I went with the purest of intentions, no suit, no smoke.....and I never got stung.



One day when we were cleaning the hives, Peewee pulled a dripping comb out of the super and I stuck my finger in a sun warmed piece of the amber honeycomb and licked the warm honey.

"What you think? Ono, ya?

"Yes." 

And I thought: I am at long last where I want to be.

In this lovely climate with long sunny seasons, there were new blossoms every month. It was never cold, much less a frost. So the bees flourished the whole year. Beekeeping has long periods of idleness and Peewee did the woodwork, so this sort of boutique beekeeping was the perfect pastime, as well as a viable business.

"Like Sherlock Holmes." I said one day to Rain.

"But you had retired, Holmes. We heard of you as living the life of a hermit amongst your bees and your books on a small farm."
"Exactly Watson, please, and here is the fruit of my leisured ease."

Rain smiled and continued chipping away at the accumulation of propolis.

"He's in a book" I said of Sherlock Holmes. "A detective."

Rain shrugged and continued to scrape the bee made patching caulk into a bucket.

More than ever, I was convinced that I was where I wanted to be, in a place where good souls like Rain and Peewee knew propolis but did not know Sherlock Holmes.

I did nothing for a while except work among the bees, straightening and cleaning the hives, extracting the honey in the spinner, and sometimes driving to the small restaurants, retreats, health food stores and hippie flops to sell it by the gallon. 

I liked the simple minded honey gathering as the bees did most of the work.
Jen would reach her bare arms down in the hives and have dozens of bees on her arms. She had to brush dozens more off the combs with her bare hands and I never saw her get stung.





























I remember one time when we were harvesting honey and we took turns spinning the frames of honeycomb in the extractor. The honey dripped out of the cut combs and flowed out of a spigot on to a spread out cheesecloth over a five gallon pail. There was always dead or dying bees in the heavy puddle of honey in the cheesecloth strainer. 



The bees would drown noiselessly in the honey, without much of a fuss. It was almost as if they enjoyed it. Guzzling sweetness until they were gorged and resembled insects in Paleozoic amber. I thought that this is the way a lush would drown in whiskey, sinking and smiling at the bottom of the still as the bubbles rose to the top.

"That's you," Rain said, poking at a drowned bee in the depths of the honey puddle. It was understood that the bee's life was perfect.

"Now if the river was whiskey and I was a divin' duck
"Now if the river was whiskey and I was a divin' duck
"I would dive on the bottom, never would come up

"Old blues song." I said as I hummed it.

 Peewee said "Haole song".

"Sleepy John Estes, like 1929." I said.

Rain didn't even shrug.

More than ever, I was convinced that I was where I wanted to be, in a place where good souls like Rain and Peewee knew the difference between Royal Jelly and pollen but did not know that Charlie Pool and Taj Mahal had also covered "If Whiskey Was a River".

As I joggled along the bumpy road in Shipman's pick up truck, headed back to the big house, I reflected on my life, beginning with my first misapprehensions. For years, especially those early years, I might wonder how I was going to end up. Now I knew that I had come to the end of something.

Long ago I had seen myself floating down the Mississippi on the raft with Huck and Jim, smoking corn silk and lazily tending the fire as we made our way down the churning brown Mississippi to a better life in New Orleans. 

Things eventually transpired as they did and the decades passed as they did and I found myself in retreat in the Pacific.

All those years of busting my ass, and what had it come to?

An a-frame in the jungles of Puna, waiting for a sign.

Rock happy.

Rain and Peewee understood that, it was how life was lived here. In Whyee, we were small, like people on a raft. This raft was the tip of a rock so heavy that it depresses almost four miles of the Earth's mantle into the lithosphere; measured from its base, it is almost twice as high as Everest. We live on that rock and we watch the water and we watch the skies.

On that raft one day, separating the nectar combs from the honeycombs, Rain said, "Tell me a talk story, Ted." "You know,  a mo'olelo."

"I don't know any stories," I said. 

"Help me out here. Give me the first sentence."

"Once there was a man on an island," she began.

"He came from far away," I said.

"But what about the island?"

"It was a big, jagged, fragrant and beautiful green island.

 He said 'I want to stay here', so he got a job tending bees."

"You seem to know lots of stories" said Peewee."Tell us all of them."

"Some are happy and some of them are sad," I said.

"All happy stories are the same, said Rain, pleased with herself for feeding me this literary line. "But every unhappy story is different, unhappy in its own way."

"Anna Karenina by Tolstoy?" I said.

Rain shrugged. 

"Haole book." said Peewee

People elsewhere said how distant I was, and all but off the map, but it was they who were far away, still groping onward.

 I was at last where I wanted to be.

I had proved what I had always suspected, that even the crookedest journey is the way home.

Thanks for stopping by

This is another Tedism. The full tedious disclaimer and definition of a Tedism may be found in my Blogger Profile.

But basically, I take a source of information, usually a book, and plagiarize, abridge, edit, and completely fuck around with it, adding my own characters and verse until it fits my story line. In some cases it is word for word, in others I don't think even the author would recognize it as his work in what I present. I give credit where credit is due, with the hopes that it may turn readers on to books and authors that they might not read otherwise. I also like the fact that an author wrote a situation down as much as 100 years ago that is now happening in my life. In this case it was Hotel Honolulu, by the great Paul Theroux.

Although the whole blog is a Tedism, two notable ones are  One Strange Camping Trip and Primal Monotony and the Permanent Now