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Outside Magazine March 2002

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Soaked (Cont.)


	Tangled up in green: Caught in the scraggly cluthes of Alakai, the writer works his way toward a better understanding of da aina

YEARS AGO, historian Kirkpatrick Sale came across a Spanish term, querencia, while researching a biography of Christopher Columbus. "Querencia," Sale wrote, "is the deep sense of inner well-being that comes from knowing a particular place on the Earth; its daily and seasonal patterns, its fruits and scents, its soils and birdsongs."

The deeper we push into the swamp the more difficult it becomes for Wild Bill to contain his querencia. He stops every ten minutes to talk story. He recalls great storms and epic boar hunts, island lore and family tales. Meanwhile, I'm stealing impatient glances at my watch. Not to mention the sky. The blue hole, and the eerie absence of rain, suddenly puts me in mind of Joaquin Phoenix's unctuous couplet from Gladiator: It vexes me; I am terribly vexed.

Bill uses this rare meteorological moment to give us a history lesson. "Long time ago when the sugar plantations were thriving," he says, "the white people would settle disputes with workers by refusing to pay or feed them. So a few people came up here to the swamp to hunt for food. There's a place across that ridge there called Rapozo Puka—Rapozo's Hole—named for Jungalo Rapozo, who used to hunt up here. There were so many pigs back there, he fed most of the village in Pakala."

Bill swipes at the trail with his machete and dresses a lehua branch with pink plastic ribbon.

"The swamp was a place the Hawaiians could go and nobody could reach them," he continues. "In the 1890s, there was a gentleman named Cowboy Koolau. He had leprosy. They wanted to ship him to the leper colony on Molokai, but Koolau wanted to live out his days here on his home island. So he and his wife escaped up Kalalau Valley and into the high swamp. The white man sent in sheriffs to hunt this man down, a man of da aina, to bring him to Molokai.

"In the process Koolau ended up shooting a sheriff on one of the high ridges. Now he was wanted for murder. The president of the Republic of Hawaii declared martial law, sent soldiers after him with big guns." Bill pauses. "They never found him."

Koolau killed a sheriff and three soldiers and survived in Kauai's swamps for three more years before dying of leprosy. Jack London spun the tale of the legendary outlaw into one of his most popular short stories, "Koolau the Leper."

Three mud-caked, sweat-drenched 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 tells me. That way? I step 20 paces off-trail and get the heebie-jeebies.

"CAN YA HEAR ME NOWWWWwwww?"

I might as well be shouting into a snowstorm. "I've only been out this far once, about ten years ago, before the hurricane," Bill says when I come crawling back out of the bush. "Lotta stuff blow over, ah?" Thick trunks and branches crisscross the ridgetop. Where the rainforest hadn't reclaimed the remnants of the old rain-gauge path, 1992's Hurricane Iniki pretty much finished the job.

We muddle along behind Bill's machete strokes but the tangle around us shows no sign of abating. We pick our way across a thin ridge that skirts a sheer 80-foot drop. I check the map: No such cliff. It seems that when the cartographers got this far into the swamp, they just threw up their hands and started doodling topo squiggles. "I wanna get back through this section before dark," says Bill. Good thinking.

One hour and a few hundred yards later, I climb the lehua tree and deliver the bad news. We stumble back to Bill's camp in the dimming light.

Bill puts a brave face on it. "I'm tellin' you, Bruce, you came here on one a the rarest times a the year. Rains here alla time—but not today." I'm realizing something else, though: The forest itself is the rain. Rain keeps the cliffs slick, the forest lush, overgrown, squishy. The Alakai Swamp is rain expressed as a green solid. The wettest spot on earth is guarded by a five-mile-thick cube of biomass that never stops growing.

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