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Outside Magazine March 2002

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Soaked ( Cont.)

"HOLD ON NOW, FELLAS," says Bill, and we plunge to the bottom of another man-eating puddle. Two days of hard rain have left the road to the trailhead impassable to all but a few overbuilt four-by-fours. As Bill's Super Swamper tires churn through the muck, Kike, Skip, and I pinball around the cab of his truck, a Ford F-150 XLT customized to survive Kauai's gloppy red-dirt interior. We pass three biologists radio-tracking rare birds and stop to greet two bedraggled German hikers.

"Hey!" Bill calls out. "You guys see any wild boar around here?" Hans and Franz respond with puzzled looks; they can't break the language barrier. "Wild! Boar!" Bill yells, as if volume were the problem. They smile, shake their heads, and flash us a shaka, the Hawaiian "hang loose" hand signal.

Three mud-caked hours from Bill's camp, we reach what might be the secret spur to Waialeale. Bill isn't sure. "Bruce, you go that way and give us a yell every 20 feet." he says. That way?

"I'm not into killing mammals," Bill explains as we bounce down the road. "I love to see a deer in a national forest. But there's nothing nice about a boar. It's a nasty varmint. Got those overgrown tusks. Do you know, Bruce, when they swing their head from side to side, those tusks are moving at 70 miles an hour? I lost three dogs to the boar last year."

The mud track ends on a bluff overlooking the Alakai. A series of green ridges and valleys unrolls before us like furry waves. Somewhere in the distance lies Waialeale. We're already running late—road's a bitch, brah—but the freaky blue hole overhead portends quick passage to the fogbound summit. The state has erected a wooden sign at the trailhead. THERE IS NO TRAIL TO WAIALEALE, it announces, as if giving us fair warning. Somebody has scratched off the no.

"Very few guys hunt this area," says Bill. "Number-one reason, it's hard to get your bearing when you're hunting back there. Lotta hunters are afraid of that. And not many people have a good sense of direction. One thing I was given as a gift—my dad had it, my granddad had it—is a sense of direction. You'll see what I mean when we get back there." The deceptions of the Alakai Swamp begin with its name. "Swamp" seduces you with visions of a low, boggy country, something that might breed thick-skinned reptiles or poorly educated men named Cooter. It's wet, all right—where the water hasn't collected in brown pools, it lies hidden under a matrix of rotting vegetation. But flat it is not. The swamp rises up to Waialeale over steep ridges that are choked with the gnarled limbs of lehua trees, Brobdingnagian tree ferns, and the bladelike fronds of the uluhe plant. For every step you take there's a root to trip you or a vine to wrap around your neck or an overhanging branch to clobber your skull.

We push through anyway, the forest effervescing around us like a Pleistocene bathhouse. Our immediate goal is to stash our sleeping gear at one of Bill's secret hunting camps (secret because the state frowns on such incursions), then make our fast-and-light dash to the summit. After the first bridgeless river crossing, however, the trail disappears. Four exhausting hours later, Bill suddenly comes to a halt. "We cut right from here," he says. Only there's nothing to the right but open air.

No matter. Bill plunges into an unmarked ravine, as if swallowed by the jungle. Skip, Kike, and I tumble and crash after him and end up shin-deep in a blackwater bog connected to one of the many rivers draining the swamp. We can barely make out Bill's form through the seven-foot ferns. He stops atop a small knoll to take his bearings.

"Go back, Kike!" he calls out. "Try that otha way." We exchange wary glances. Does this guy know where he's going? More to the point, does he know where he's at? Skip hurriedly punches the waypoint into his GPS.

"Wow. River came up high," says Bill, pointing to the bath ring of woody debris left on the bank by the last flood. "Hope my camp's still there."

On a continuum of phrases you'd rather not hear from your guide, this sits somewhere between "You carry the tent" and "Play dead when he charges." Bill takes the lead again, patiently slogging through the marsh and reading the land, confident that his senses will lead him home. After 20 minutes he spots a scrap of blue tarp peeking through the palm fronds. "This way to the DeCosta hacienda!" he yells.

Under a three-tarp lean-to, Bill has stashed all the comforts a wild-pig hunter requires: warm blankets, foam padding, a stove, a lantern, and enough Campbell's Chunky soup to sustain a hungry man for a week. On a rope that anchors the shelter to a tree hang a T-shirt, a pair of denim cutoffs, and three socks, which, this being the doorstep to the wettest spot on earth, have become prosperous mildew ranches.

"I bring my young dogs here once or twice in the summer," Bill says. "The pigs this far back in the swamp don't have a lot of experience with dogs, so they're easier to catch." Two boar skulls hanging from a nearby branch testify to the effectiveness of Bill's methods.

After dumping weight at this swampside Sheraton, we scramble back up the ridge and head for the peak. It took six hours, twice as long as we scheduled, to reach Bill's camp. We press on into the swamp with the hope that the rainforest may give way to an open plain. It is a futile hope. The lengthening shadows hint at the coming arrival of failure. At which point our quest may become something else entirely.

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