Monday, August 23, 2004

Little Shop of Fetishes

Goddamn Monday morning.  Already I’ve written a breathtakingly beautiful post that vaporized as soon as I tried to publish it; also, I’m tired as hell - I watched Kill Bill II last night and after it ended at 11 or so, I lay in bed having waking dreams of Sanjuro and Zatoichi for hours, flavored with bits of Scarface, which I had seen Friday night.  Not exactly the stuff of sweet restful slumbers.  When I finally did fall asleep, it was only a short time before my adorable old cat started making kissyface with me at four o’freaking clock in the morning. Luckily, she only did so for 75 minutes, giving me a quarter of one of your Earth-hours before the alarm went off and NPR welcomed me to a new week of highly detailed work and stressful telephone calls.  My ass, as the sages said, is dragging. 

(Which reminds me of an observation Kelly made yesterday: we were driving past a bus that had a billboard on it advertising a circus.  It showed two elephants walking away from the camera, with the text, “We’re Back!” Kelly noted that, for purposes of accuracy, that it really should say, “We’re ASS.” She also saw an ad for Eclipse gum that, she insists, reads “Eat Crack; Yackety-Yak.” I am hopeful that these signal a trend toward more butt jokes in advertisements.  A man needs something to hope for, does he not?)

So I’m going to try to do a quick reconstruction of the previously crafted post, just so that I can feel as if I’ve made some damn headway into this week.  The more I screw things up, the more obsessive I am about fixing them.  It’s not healthy but if I can get things back the way I originally intended them to be, I might - just might - be able to move forward.  Otherwise, I will just sit and stew, and that’s not going to smell good by the end of the day.  There’s only so much aggravation I can accomodate in a given week, and I don’t want to blow my whole quota before noon on Monday.

So: on this misty grey morning where the fog is so thick the streets are wet and the trees rain dusty drops of precipitation from their leaves, I’ll try to reconstruct a Tropical Tidbit about a fellow we met a few weeks ago.  We had visited a beautiful valley on the north shore of the island and came back via a small town that was famous for a bakery we wanted to investigate.  The bakery closed at noon, however, as we discovered when we arrived there at 1:30 or so, so we just strolled up and down the main drag - about two blocks long - and windowshopped.  The town was quaint and visually entertaining, but we weren’t interested in anything they were trying to sell us.... On our way downtown we had passed a guy who caught my eye - tall, broad and heavy, redfaced and sweaty, with white hair under a nice straw hat, wearing a stylish aloha shirt and full-length khaki trousers.  On our way back to the car, he saw us peering into a window in one of three closed storefronts in a big brick-red wooden building where all the windows were shuttered, and asked us if we wanted to see inside his little shop.  He owned the whole building, he told us, and occupied all three storefronts - but he wanted to re-organize the stock, move some items into or out of storage, paint the place, restore it to its original condition.  Until he’d done that, the place was closed - but we could peek in if we were interested.  We were soggy with torpid lethargy in the heat of the afternoon’s height and easily conceded to view whatever it was he wanted to show us.  He took a key from his pocket and unlocked a padlock on the door of the middle storefront, opened it up and let us into a cool, dusty museum of international swag. 

Our eyes quickly adjusted to the murk, but only to be dazzled by innumerable garrish masks glaring at us from the walls - New Guinean, African, South American, Victorian.  Carved fetishes and statuettes populated every table and display case, clamoring against each other in silent frenzies.  An old card catalog cabinet burst with fertility carvings that erupted randomly from the drawers.  Exotic textiles and old carved model ships, drums and wall-hangings, spears and hats and objects that evaded description poured forth from huge antique armoires and covered most of the floor.  It was a long room with a high ceiling, filled with artifacts from everywhere.  “My grandfather,” the man told us, pointing to a portrait hanging high on a wall near the front door depicting a classic sea-dog with long white beard and jaunty captain’s cap, “was a trader - had his own ship and sailed around the world, buying and selling whatever he found.  My father too, till he came here and met my mother (she’s a native hawaiian, though you couldn’t tell from looking at me), and then he bought this building and opened this shop.  I lived on the mainland most of my life, but when my father died I came here to take over from him.  But for my life I can’t tell what to charge for any of this stuff.  A lot of it, I don’t even know what it is or where it came from.  I’ve got this store plus two other units in the building just for warehouses, crammed to the rafters with this stuff.  There’s ivory, but I don’t want to sell it - politically incorrect and all.  And there’s Hawaiian stuff but the locals don’t like me selling that either.  I want to repaint, reorganize, get this place in shape and start selling - but I don’t even know where to start.”

We wandered around the warren of teak and koa and ebony and other exotic woods, the crazed eyes of carved gods following us around the room until our heads were as packed and busy as the room itself; it was time to move on so we shook our host’s hand, thanked him for the tour and history lesson, and wandered back into the afternoon sun.  I can’t shake the feeling now, that somewhere in that menagerie of statuary, tucked back in one of the attics or warehouses, there are now little figurines of us, waiting for another tourist to wander in, waiting for a chance to plead with silent wooden features for release back into the outside world. 

The cool thing is, that is a true story.  And below, please enjoy a few true pictures.  These are from our trip home from the mountaintop observatories that I posted photos of last friday.  The traditional way of getting to that mountaintop is along a lonely two-lane highway called Saddle Road, that used to be in terrible condition but now is just austere in the extreme.  However, while at the visitor’s center up at 9200 feet, some other tourists suggested we’d enjoy taking Mana Road back - it’s a left turn just before Saddle Road, onto a dirt track that wends halfway around the mountain through utterly unpopulated reaches of wilderness right back to the town where we were staying.  We took their suggestion and here’s what we found:

This is what Mana Road generally looked like for most of its length: rocky, rough, but easy enough to distinguish from the landscape when you’re right on top of it.  However, do you notice how the road seems to disappear into the mist?  We should have taken that as a hint....

This was a piece of farm equipment we found abandoned along the side of the road.  We were driving through pastureland, but occasionally we’d find evidence of heavier industrial farming from some time in the past.  I just liked the way this big earth-punching cylinder looked, so I pulled over and shot it. 

This was the signpost that told us to turn around and go back the way we came.  We’d gotten to a point about 25 miles in, where the road forked and we didn’t know which way would get us back home.  We got out and hiked both of the trails to see what we could find; both of them stumbled along with increasingly little reliable road surface for about three hundred yards, and then just disappeared into rocky outcroppings and open pastures full of energetic long-horn cattle.  It was past five in the afternoon and the sun was dropping behind the mountain; fog was starting to pour over the volcano’s shoulder and we were hungry and tired.  We turned around and went back the way we came. 

That’s enough for now.  Enjoy what’s left of your day.  No, really.