Here is a picture of a lauhala craftsman who works in Hilo that must be in her 80s and 90s who was sharing stories with our friend Laurie Rohrer. She makes the tiny lauhala treasures that aren't made anymore - tiny birds, calling card cases, like that. Wish we could remember her name! her store has been in the same place for decades and decades. She gave us her business cards, they were all hand written.
On Sunday when the events were over, there was more time to sit around and talk story. It was a calm and reflective time. We took some of my mom's ashes to hilo bay and set them free with fragments of the leis we had worn. We drove up the beautiful Hamakua coast to sit on the porch of a friend and reminisce about what we had seen. It's amazing how, if you talk to enough people, you start hearing variations and 'the skinny' about nearly everything. Down in Ka`u, we heard the great comments and the critical comments about different local folks; we heard about 3 different stories about what is actually happening to the coastline in Ka`u near Punalu`u, and heard a 4th version probably the right one our last day. We got much more information that we knew there was, about so much. It's truly a closelit interwoven community, Hawaiian music and hula, and even when you think you know some form of truth, a new truth emerges. And over on the dry side, we got different stories from our hosts there. And even when the stories are a little biting, it's still shared with aloha and in pretty good fun. Because we all like the art form of hula and mele so much.
One of the best things about sunday, monday and tuesday was running into local folks who would tell us their adventures. Up in Hamakua, we met the grandson of a shopkeeper friend of ours, he is back just newly out of the Air Force for 8 years or so. He grew up south of Hilo, so he speaks a pretty classic pigdin. So he told us with a lot of great details about how when he entered the airforce, his 'ol southern boy leaders felt sure that with an accent and phrases like his, he must be maybe hispanic and definitely should need 'remedial English courses.' Not on your life! then they decided well if it wasn't the language comprehenesion he needed to work on, must be the reading. He must need reading classes. He showed us a great parody of the speed reading he showed them. Then he made great parodies of 'those Harvard folks' and the southern accented people he ran into. And how he had to explain to them what Hawaii was. guess with his hilo accent, they didn't really get it, til once he said 'you know, hula' they understood he meant Ha why eee. We had a lot of fun listening to him. And his very proud grandmother was enjoying it too. Then she shared stuff with him: he just spent 4 years in Italy, never knowing he's like, 1/4 Italian. Surprise! As well as the Samoan, Hawaiian, french, portuguese, whatever, that he already knew about. Oh you know, she said; when my kids were in school, they got a lot of grief because they had a funny sounding last name, so I had to change it; but you are actually Italian/English too not just Samoan. In the Islands, I guess, your ancestry may be something you just don't know, til you go ask grandma...
He was talking too about taking his Northern Italian accent down to Sicily and how funny it was to not be understood there. I could just imagine his northern italian perhaps with a Hawaiian flavor too. It was great fun.
Later we got to talking with another young woman, who was working at the Vintage Hawaiian aloha shirts in the 'Queens shops' in Waikoloa, to help pay her way through school. She's a hula dancer of course, knows the Brian Eselu halau guys, has got connections to the Lim family halaus, gave us lots of good scoops on what it's like to study at UH Hilo, told us how to look up brian Eselu's halaus you tube of their winning entry hula, 'Tu 'Oe', and shared with us what it was like for her to prepare for the merrie monarch in prior years. And how long it takes to make those enormous horse leis, staying up all night.
She told usthe videos of O'Bryan Eselu's Halau, Ke Kai O Kahiki, would be up soon on youtube. (It is: see:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_pNMveyMeg
)
Then she also told us to go search for her favorite other past merrie monarch you tubes:
search for 2006 Ka Pa Hula O Ka Lei Lehua, both the kane and the wahine, hulu Snowbird Bento (I think this was her year), and also, 2006 Halau Hula O Kamuela Auwana, and also 2006 Halau Hula O Ka Leo O Ka Hihikina O Ka La.
I think Honoka`a remains one of our favorite towns. Lately there are some new stores and one woman and her sister have two of them, and they have the highest quality balinese-made hawaiian style batiks I've ever seen. She was also sharing so much with us: her family born in Waipio, her recent time in Molokai, and then all about her recent trips in Bali and Thailand. It was nice to get her take on it all. And she obviously has as much fun in Bali as we do. I'm glad that the type of art I saw in her store, is originating from a hawaiian born person and family, not just some smart mainland ha`ole seeing an opportunity. They also have really nice Thai made hawaiian style dinnerware. Wish we needed some enough to afford it!
The second time we went back to Honoka`a, our friend Michael totally discouraged us. It's raining hard over there! he said. Well he was right, but when you are a Hilo side addict, what could be better than a nice soft warm caressing Hamakua rain!
We caught some really beautiful spots on the dry side and north kohala side though. With all the rains, there is a lot of greenery and even the desert looks inviting. The cows and goats and horses are having a great time.
We went over to the Pololu valley, and hiked down into it, and it was a blazing hot day due to Kona wind conditions (the opposite of the trades). That's a great black sand beached valley, with a small forest of large ironwood trees lining the beach dunes, and it was once a properous hawaiian taro farming community, died out because the water got diverted for sugar cane lands back in the early-mid 1900s. Down in the Pololu valley, on the beach, people lived in hippie style in the 60s and there are still ropeswings, and driftwood huts, and cooking and camping areas there that folks do use. Here are Craig and me in our little driftwood shack:
On the west hot side, the swimming was really nice too on some of the bright white sand, black lava, giant old keawe-lined trees. It's still possible without much difficulty to find beaches that still seem to be isolated and far, and still have traces of the original coast dwellers homes and places of worship. And they are all so pretty on the west side when you can see the five huge mountains at once: Mauna Kea, Mauna Loa, Hualalai, the Kohala range, and way off to the northwest, at twilight, the south side of Haleakala across the ocean straights in Maui.
The takehome memories of this trip that really pleased us? The abundance of Hawaiian conversations heard everywhere among young people and their pride and enthusiasm of including hawaiian language and lectures in their college coursework. The top class music and dance and impromptu dance heard all week long, including the comeback of KAPA radio, its really pleasant again, kaparadio.com if you want to hear it streamed. In particular, the hula we saw of one of the main dancers of Manu Boyd, first name Nohea, dancing to Beautiful Kahana sung by Glenn Smith. The fragrances of all parts of the island: the forest scents of lawa'e ferns, and great lei flower fragrances like pua kenikeni and ginger, and the way that our maile lei that we bought for Craig's birthday hawaiian lau hala handmade hat intensified as it dried. Also the sweet clear flavor of lau hala itself. And the salty fragrance of the west coast. We'd go back right now, if we could, and do it all over again.
That's Auntie Suguwara in her lauhala shop in Hilo. She used to run the shop with her sisters: we first learned of them from an article in "Travel & Leisure" magazine in November 2004. We've visited them ever since, every time we get to Hilo. The first time we went to their shop, there was another sister there, who made the most amazing giant crocheted blankets. It was a little sad to see just the one Auntie this time; we didn't have the heart to ask about her sister.
ReplyDeleteHere's an excerpt about them from the T&L article (by Guy Trebay):
"We were five sisters, first-generation Japanese-Americans," June Sugawara told me one afternoon as the town thronged with athletes who’d arrived to participate in the 11th Biennial Vaa Races, outrigger canoe races then under way in Hilo Bay. "During the war we used to send all our weavings to Honolulu. We opened this shop later, to sell things ourselves."
The decision to take up an old Hawaiian craft was a matter of happenstance, said Ms. Sugawara. "People wove lauhala just to keep busy, because they had begun planting coffee and coffee takes a long time to grow," she explained. "You have to do something with the time."