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Outside Magazine March 2002

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Soaked ( Cont.)


	Swamp Thing: Bill Decosta displays his Egyptian pharoah hound tattoo. Boars are "nasty varmints," he says.

I LIVE IN SEATTLE, a city famous for its wetness. From November to June, the constant drizzle turns western Washington into a damp basement with too few windows. Though I was born and raised there, each winter the rain becomes a little more intolerable. Moisture seeps into the skull and rots the mind. Moss grows in the lee of my car's sideview mirror. The whole world feels itchy.

And yet, for some unhinged reason, I wanted to see rain at its worst. The peak of Waialeale promised the sorriest, soggiest atmosphere on the planet. But experiencing it required getting to it. Make inquiries about how to reach Waialeale and you'll encounter descriptions of impregnability not heard since Lawrence of Arabia took briefings on Aqaba. "We don't go there, and neither should you" is the constant refrain. But among the sportsmen and guides on Kauai whom I talked to, there was one man who knew the pig-rooting backcountry of the Alakai Swamp better than anyone. They called him Wild Bill.

"You're looking at a third-generation Hawaiian boar hunter here, Bruce," said Bill DeCosta the first time we met. I could tell. He was standing under the head of a 175-pound Polynesian pig, one of six tusk-hogs mounted on the living room wall in his suburban rambler tucked into the foothills above Kalaheo, on Kauai's southern coast. Bill is 36. He works as a longshoreman on the docks of Nawiliwili Harbor and has been hunting in the swamp since he was seven. "Some guys hunt. Ah, but Billy," DeCosta's friend Jarvin Peralta told me, "Billy gotta hunt. It's in his blood."

Bill had cultivated a look all his own: jet-black mullet, Fu Manchu mustache, Frank Zappa-esque lower-lip soul patch. He wasn't tall, an asset when bushwhacking through hairy foliage. He preferred to dress in fatigues. He spoke in a mellifluous blend of college-educated English and island patois, and his left shoulder bore an elaborate tattoo of an Egyptian pharaoh hound, the breed of dog he uses to hunt wild boar. In the Alakai Swamp. Armed with only a Rambo knife. In the dark.

Bill told me a bit about himself as he fried up some wild boar tips on his kitchen stove: that he was born and raised on Kauai but comes from Portuguese stock; that the money his father saved by bringing home wild-pig meat helped put Bill through Humboldt State University in California; that once his dogs corner a boar, Bill finishes it off with a knife thrust behind the front shoulder; that he carries the kill out of the bush by wearing it like a pig backpack; that he trades ham and bacon with his friends and relatives for island-made salt, island-caught fish, and island-grown fruits and vegetables, as part of an extensive barter economy that blunts the high cost of living in a tourist preserve.

He wasn't sure what to make of me, so he called his brother to see if he wanted to join us. His brother was skeptical. "My bruddah wants to make sure you're not some environmentalist who wants to go back and discover some rare birds and plants," said Bill.

I assured him I was not. State and federal agencies are under a court order to designate portions of the Alakai Swamp and nearby Waimea Canyon—38,000 acres in all—as critical habitat for more than 70 rare native plants listed as threatened or endangered during the 1990s. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service initially declined to map out the critical habitat areas because it didn't want to provide directions for rare-plant thieves. Environmental groups took Fish and Wildlife to court in 1997 and won, and now the habitat areas are going forward. Habitat designation puts up an additional roadblock to development but doesn't restrict hunting. Kauai's hunters and environmentalists get along better than most, because the hunters kill the feral pigs that root up the rare plants. Still, Bill and his fellow sportsmen suspect this could be the first step toward kicking the local people out of the swamp altogether.

"The white man with the money, he'll come and buy his safe haven," Bill told me. "I can barely afford this home I'm on right now. So my safe haven is using da aina—the land."

Although willing to lead me, Kike, and Skip into the swamp, Bill remained dubious about our chances of making it to the summit of Waialeale, which even he had never seen.

"Would be so easy to get lost back there, brah," he said. "Everything looks the same."

Yes, I said, but we have a plan! Starting from Kokee State Park, on the west side of Waialeale, we would drive as far into the Na PaliÐKona Forest Reserve as the rutted forest road would allow, then hike an unmaintained trail east through the Alakai Swamp to its closest point to the peak, and from there bushwhack our way up to the summit. If my USGS topo map could be trusted, we were looking at a round-trip of 40 miles, 18 of them on foot, and an elevation gain of just over a thousand feet. Barring any snafus, we could make it in, up, and back out in three days, or two very long ones.

It looked good on paper. But not to Bill. "Bruce," he said. "Realistically speaking? Your mountaineer people who go to the Cascades? They'll spend months back there, they don't know where they going."

"Skip's bringing a GPS unit," I piped up.

"Never worked with GPS," said Bill. "Only GPS is what I got up here." He tapped his temple. "I work with pink ribbon. Find my own way back."

"What's the main concern?" I asked. "The clouds coming down?"

Bill nodded. "You on the wettest spot in the world. That cloud cover come in, this time a year. Cold. Wet. Blind. Be pretty miserable, Bruce."

We finished off the boar tips, which tasted like the ham they serve in heaven, and Bill called his boss down at the docks to see if he could swing three days off. He got two. We agreed to meet before dawn two days later and give it our best shot.

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