Status Updates From La maldición de Lono

“Look,” he was saying. “We're both in trouble.”

That was the problem, Ralph. We were blind. The story we wanted was right in front of our eyes from the very start -- although we can be excused, I think, for our failure to instantly understand a truth beyond reality.

YESTERDAY'S WEIRDNESS IS TOMORROW'S REASON WHY

It is not like fishing for trout. What we are talking about here is a beast the size of a donkey that is fighting for its life on its own turf. A ten-pound trout might put up an elegant fight, but a 300- pound marlin with a hook in its throat can rip your arm-bones right out of their sockets, then leap right into the boat and snap your spine like a toothpick.

I didn't pack that goddamn brutal Samoan war club in my seabag for the purpose of crushing ice. There is a fearful amount of leverage in that bugger, and I knew in my heart that by the end of the day I would find a reason to use it. . . On something: maybe a fish, or maybe the fighting chair. There is a lot of mahogany to work with on a thirty-six-foot Rybovich.

So much for that, eh? I think it's time to leave.
But before I go I want to tell you a fish story.

About six hours after I finished the last draft on driving the Saddle Road, I was sitting in the fighting chair on a boat called the Humdinger and locked into a desperate struggle with a huge fish -- and 17 minutes later I had it reeled up so close to the boat that I was able to reach out and shatter its brain with one crazed swooping blow from the Great Samoan war club.

I type all night and prowl the roads by day, looking for Pele. She hitchhikes a lot, they say, usually in the form of an old woman. So I do a lot of driving and I pick up many hitchhikers, especially old women. . . but age is a hard thing to be sure of at 55 miles an hour; and the lazy shameful truth is that on any hot afternoon I can be found cruising Alii Drive in my T-top Mustang picking up women of all ages.

Forty thousand feet deep in some places, within sight of the Kona Coast. Eight miles straight down, off a cliff. It would take a long time for a body to sink eight miles down to the ocean floor. It is pitch-black down there, absolute darkness.

Every successful charter boat captain understands the difference between the Fishing Business and Show Business. Fishing is what happens out there on the deep blue water, and the other is getting strangers to pay for it.

King Kamehameha died on the eighth day of May, 1819, at the age of 61. His body was burned in a firepit and his bones were buried in a secret cave by his main kahunas, who never disclosed the site. King Kam has many monuments in Hawaii, but no tombstone. The same kahunas who buried his bones also ate his heart, for the power that was in it -- just as Kamehameha himself once fed on the heart of Captain Cook.

“There's only one place for us now -- the City of Refuge.”

They call it “Kona Weather”; gray skies and rough seas, hot rain in the morning and mean drunks at night, bad weather for coke fiends and boat people. . . A huge ugly cloud hangs over the island at all times, and this goddamn filthy sea pounds relentlessly up on the rocks in front of my porch. . .

The Christmas season, in Hawaii, is also the time of the annual Feast of Lono, the god of excess and abundance.

TITS LIKE ORANGE FIREBALLS

Mark Twain did not lie -- at least not about the Pacific Ocean in winter. The Kona Coast in December is as close to hell on earth as a half-bright mammal can get -- and this is the leeward side of the “Big Island”: this is the calm side.

The Kona Coast is on the leeward side of the Big Island, protected by the towering humps of two 14,000-foot volcanoes from the prevailing northeast winds. The whole east coast of the island is a jagged wasteland of ferns and black boulders, lashed by the same Arctic winds that make the north coast of Oahu a surfer's paradise.

Journalism is a Ticket to Ride, to get personally involved in the same news other people watch on TV -- which is nice, but it won't pay the rent, and people who can't pay their rent in the Eighties are going to be in trouble. We are into a very nasty decade, a brutal Darwinian crunch that will not be a happy time for free-lancers.

Why do those buggers run? Why do they punish themselves so brutally, for no prize at all? What kind of sick instinct would cause eight thousand supposedly smart people to get up at four in the morning and stagger at high speed through the streets of Waikiki for 26 ball-busting miles in a race that less than a dozen of them have the slightest chance of winning?

We spent the next few days in deep research. Neither one of us had the vaguest idea what went on at a marathon, or why people ran in them, and I felt we should ask a few questions and perhaps mingle a bit with the runners.

“Okay,” he said. “This is a wonderful story about how your worst nightmares can come true at any moment, with no warning at all.”
“Good,” I said. “Let's hear it. I like these stories. They speak to my deepest fears.”
“They should,” he said. “Paranoia pays, over here.”

“Those birds are weird,” Skinner said. “I've had some real peculiar conversations with them.”

“This running thing is out of control,” he said. “Every rich liberal in the Western world is into it. They run ten miles a day. It's a goddamn religion.”
“Do you run?” I asked.
He laughed. “Hell yes, I run. But never with empty hands. We're criminals, Doc. We're not like these people and I think we're too old to learn.”

I could hear their ukuleles playing
Down by the sea. . .
She's gone with the hula hula boys
She don't care about me
Ha'ina 'ia mai ana ka puana
Ha'ina 'ia mai ana ka puana. . .

He saw me as I approached, and held out his hand. “Hello, Doc,” he said with a curious smile. “I thought you quit this business.”
“I did,” I said. “But I got bored.”

My friend Gene Skinner met us at the airport in Honolulu, parking his black GTO convertible up on the sidewalk by the baggage carousel and fending off public complaints with a distracted wave of his hand and the speedy behavior of a man with serious business on his mind.

On the gray afternoon of January 16, 1779, Captain James Cook, the greatest explorer of his age, sailed the two ships of his Third Pacific Expedition into the tiny rock-walled shelter of Kealakekua Bay on the west coast of a previously uncharted mid-Pacific island called “Owhyhee” by the natives, and found his place in history as the first white man to officially “discover” the Hawaiian Islands.

After six hours of failure and drunken confusion, I had finally secured two seats on the last 747 flight of the day to Honolulu. Now I needed a place to shave, brush my teeth, and maybe just stand there and look at myself in the mirror and wonder, as always, who might be looking back.

We were about forty minutes out of San Francisco when the crew finally decided to take action on the problem in Lavatory 1B.

I think we have a live one this time, old sport. Some dingbat named Perry up in Oregon wants to give us a month in Hawaii for Christmas and all we have to do is cover the Honolulu Marathon for his magazine, a thing called Running. . .