Monday, June 26, 2006
Five to Fifteen Miles per Hour
I grew up on Oahu. Every day, our forecast was the same: The high tomorrow's going to be 83 degrees, the low 75. Tomorrow afternoon there's a 20% chance of mauka showers; winds will be out of the northwest at five to fifteen miles per hour. We lived on Hickam Air Force Base, at 7101B Laniuma Loop, and even I -- cynic though I may be -- look back on the years I spent there with a warm haze of nostalgia.In the early 1980s, you let your kids go outside and play until the street lights came on. Hell, in the summertime it wasn't uncommon for me to call my parents at 10:30 or 11:00 PM to tell them that I'd be sleeping over at Palani Estaniqui's or Jonathan Segura's house. You didn't have to worry about kids being snatched and tossed in the back of some psycho's rape van. Maybe on a military base like Hickam, you still don't have to worry about it today. I hope that's true.
We had a banyan tree in our backyard. It was easily 45+ feet tall, and had vines traveling all over the place. It had to come down when the vines grew into the sewer pipes coming out of our house and made raw sewage spew crazily from our downstairs bathroom, but it was some sort of national landmark or something because apparently King Kamehameha had pissed on it. It took base Civil Engineering hours to get the okay to cut the damn thing down, and when they did some guy from the Environmental Protection Agency was there, and they brought in a Kahuna (it's not just a word surfers use; it actually means "priest") and had these rituals and for an eight-year-old, this was just the coolest experience ever (never mind the stench coming from the house).
I can't remember having the palm tree in our back yard before they cut the banyan down. I know intellectually that it must have been there, but its existence was so overshadowed by the giant, gloomy, hulking vastness of the banyan that it might as well have never existed until that day. After the death of the Banyan of Doom, my friend Palani and I discovered the palm tree, and we would climb up there every so often to steal a couple coconuts, and have Palani's dad hack them open with his machete, then he'd drill two holes so we could drink the sweet coconut milk and let it run down our chins and necks.
The world has never seemed so full of promise and wonder as it did when I was gripping the rough trunk of that palm tree with my bare feet. I was higher than Everest there, ten feet off the ground, and my best friend was hanging there with me.
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