Above is a 1961 photo showing Portlock Road, Koko Head, and to the right the epic Portlock Pier. I guess you had to grow up in the area to know how great that pier was, but so much of my best childhood memories were spent on or around it.
We tried fishing off of it and of course plop! There went Dad's fiberglass fishing pole which we said we'd be careful with. Surfers would walk out on the pier then do this neat dive off of it with their boards underneath them and go surf. The reef around the pier was fantastic and had tons of shells and things to find, including the intimidating bristle worm, a creature I learned not to touch.
I remember the fantastic day my older sister took us out to "the cave" that we got to by going up to the end of Portlock to the Kaiser Estate, through a hole between a fence and a hedge, down to the beach and out along amazing lava flats with wondereful tide pools and different colors of algae and hermit crabs galore. Did we ever get in trouble when we came back home, too, because Mom didn't know where we'd all gone off to and the place was so fascinating we were there for hours, where I believe my older sis had told Mom we'd be gone an hour.
I played along that whole stretch of beach from "the cave" down to where Kuapa Pond drains out into Moanalua Bay. Even as a teen I sailed Sunfish on Kuapa Pond itself, when my father had a place on the little island in the pond and it was me, older sis, and one of my younger sisters. I was trying to get into scientific things, and I'd lay out on the lawn at night and look at the Milky Way and imagine I'm stuck to the side of a planet that's sailing through Space, and looking out at the stellar neighborhood.
But back to the pier, because I think it's a crime it's not remembered. It was made of some kind of pressure-treated wood that got wonderfully furry and silver on the outside, and was fine and fresh below its surface. I'm going to guess it had something to do with Henry J. Kaiser because about everything in Hawaii Kai does. When you live in Hawaii Kai, go to Kaiser High School and shop at the Koko Kai shopping center, and even had a Kaiser-Frazer car in your driveway, and one of your fave beaches is at the Kaiser Estate, it's a pretty Kaiser life.
Henry J. probably just wanted a way to get out past the reef where he probably had a boat or two, to go do some marlin fishing. Like Mr. Durant did - he caught a huge marlin and after the requisite pictures were taken, it was divided up and everyone had marlin that night. I've not been able to find that much about the Durants but they had a company called Durant-Irvine Co. or DICO. They gave us a cat, a really pretty tabby, which we named Dico. So he was a cat named after a corporation.
Eventually more and more boards fell off of the pier and eventually it was a real challenge to get out to the end. Lots of rusty nails too. Parents hated the thing because they couldn't keep us kids away from it. So it was demolished which killed off the life on the reef and broke my damn heart. "Ecology" was talked about on TV and boxes of Cheerios came with those green "Ecology" flags you could stick on your bike, and I felt like I was seeing damage to the ecology up close and personal. You'd not think a 10-year-old could be worried about the environment but I sure was.
The boards from the pier were piled up on the beach, and Dad took four of them and cut grooves so they stacked like Lincoln Logs and got a big piece of plate glass from a hotel that was being demolished, and made the neatest big coffee table. We kept that thing around for years. It's how I know the pier wood was fresh as new under the surface, because I saw the cut ends before Dad painted them black, and plus we kids got into the habit of picking at the wood when we were bored. Plus eventually the glass got an awful lot of scratches. When we left our Punaluu place we left the table behind.
Why do I natter on about all this stuff though? Because since coming to the mainland I've felt like a stateless person. I thought I'd feel rooted to the mainland because of course I was actually born here. But it just doesn't seem to work that way. Hawaiians feel very rooted to the land in a way that I'm not sure mainlanders can understand.
When a Hawaiian was born, their umbilical cord was buried under the hale/house and they were bound to that land. They find the Western idea of buying and selling land and moving around rather appalling. For some reason, I feel more like a Hawaiian would than like a mainlander. I'm not sure how culture is transmitted but I seem to have internalized a lot of what they call "AAPI" or Asian-American Pacific Islander values. How, I dunno, but I'm stuck with 'em. And I've lived various places on the mainland but none of them have been home.
A friend of mine, now departed, Sam Anderson, who'd been a fighter pilot and test pilot and a bunch of neat things, including retrieving the first object brought back from Space, had this special feeling about the Prescott Arizona area. I lived out there with him for a couple periods of my life and at one point, I asked him, Why here? Why here of all places? It's nothing special.
And he told me, when he was a kid in WWII, and his father was a high ranking officer, who was a doctor so he was in tight with all the other officers who really liked him, so they liked little Sam, the doctor's kid. And they kept coming back to Prescott, AZ. It was this place where there were always comfort and good times. And Sam didn't have any easier relationship with his dad than I did with mine.
My own dad loved Kahana Bay. We'd go to the Foodland in Kaneohe and get those flat raisin cookies and to go Kahana Bay and sit and eat 'em, and Dad walked with me up to the end of the beach most people don't go to, where there's hau forest down to the shore and there are all these little white clam shells. Kahana Bay was my dad's comfort place.
I have my suspicions that my parents visited Hawaii well before we kids came along. I think my grand-aunt had at least passed through from the 30's on, as she traveled all over the Pacific in the process of becoming Commanding Officer Of All The Military Libraries In The Indo-Pacific. Or whatever the title was. I seem to remember photos of her as a young person showing off her "gams" in good 1930s style, and some picture of my parents at one of the big Waikiki hotels in the 50s. They're standing in front of a banyan tree and some tiger lilies.
So the thing is, I may not have come to Hawaii myself until I was 6, but I've got a lot of history there. And I'll never "get" the mainland. All this place is about is work, work, work, sheer survival and no talking on the line; don't socialize. I really want to be out of here, if I can find some way to do it. I don't want to be homeless there and a burden to my sisters or an embarrassment to them.
I'm not even sure where I'm going with the shakuhachi. It's healthy as hell, and I'm glad I've taken it on. My whole musical "career" has been an exercise in stubbornness. I was no natural on the trumpet but over years, I actually started sounding pretty decent. Also got OK on flute, PVC flute, a bit of drums, a bit of musical saw which no one gave a damn about, and can usually pick my way around on piano.
This is all great, but how am I making the best use of my abilities? I have developed pretty decent busking powers and now that I think about it ... what was my hang-up about art? Originally I did art because it was fun. I drew my seashells and I did all sorts of things. There was no money involved. I did some really cool shit. I remember going through a chest of childhood stuff Dad had somehow hung onto and finding stuff I did when I was around 8, Xmas ornaments and drawings and things .... one of the funnest things I did was, I guess the Peanuts characters were big during the 1972 Olympics and there were these sticky stamps with Snoopy doing all kinds of events. And I liked bicycles. So I did this drawing of a 10-speed and then cut out all these little Snoopys and had them all over the bicycle, doing their events.
I also went to a school where playing cards were forbidden so naturally I made a full set of playing cards in miniature size. They were like 1/5th the size of regular ones. It was so they could be hidden. I figured I'd be the cool kid who could play surreptitious games of War when the nuns weren't looking.
I think what screwed me up was the need to make money. We lost our Portlock house and went to Pupukea but like the Biden presidency it was only a temporary respite, as computer programming kept being a dumber and dumber idea for my dad to make a living, and we got poorer and poorer.
Pretty soon we had hippies. I think the idea was they'd pay rent, but somehow that never happened. The North Shore had lots of hippies then, so we ended up with these lazy freeloaders who had a way of eating up the food. There were smart hippies but they were starting businesses in Hale'iwa and so on.
Eventually we lost the Pupukea place and Mom found a cheap place out in Punalu'u. The hippies were gone then because we got our electricity turned off in Pupukea, food got very scarce, and even hippies don't like to cook over a fire on the lawn, using an old tire as a fire ring.
Mom had kept one of the hippies - the laziest one - as a boyfriend. This is when doing art became about making some money (external goal) instead of for enjoyment (internal goal). I worked on art a fair bit, but was always kicking myself for not practicing it enough.
I had paintings of mine in the local gallery, and there's a good chance an oil painting I did is still hanging up in the office of Kahuku High School so when a kid's in trouble they can see it and wonder why I'd used so damn much blue.
The thing is, there was a great pressure to make money, to survive. And I was constantly told by my mom's useless boyfriend that "Artists don't make money until after they're dead" and "If you're gonna be an artist, you need to practice at it 8 hours a day". Well, I did try the working-long-hours thing when I did the airbrush T-shirts and we couldn't give them away. And there were only so many paintings I could sell to my high school teacher and his friends. It was all very discouraging.
I even had a bit of a mentor, an Australian seascape and landscape painter who'd retired from the Australian Navy and was now going to be a painter. And he was really good. He gave me some of his old brushes and paints and let me borrow some of his art books, and was very encouraging but even he was having a really hard time and eventually returned to Australia in disgust.
This is why I didn't stay with it. But I think having it linked to the must-make-money mindset is what really hurt my enthusiasm. But since I'm close to retirement, money's not going to be a huge problem soon. So I am thinking, maybe I should approach art like busking. I should be willing to give artwork away just like when you busk, you're giving music away.
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