WALKIN’ WITH SMOKEY

I rededicated myself to my walking regime this morning; after bouncing my tender fanny over jungle roads in a car with dead shock absorbers far too often, I realized that the one thing that most keeps me healthy and contented had been given the shortest of shrift.

As we all know, shrift is way better when it’s lengthy.

After undergoing 40 straight sessions of radiation last year, it’s tough to take the heat that a basically black car absorbs in the intense tropic climes.

It literally gives me that cooked feeling; I even stuck a fork in me when I felt done.

And I was DELICIOUS.

Be that as it may, the hours of PT Cruisin’ necessary to get anywhere in a timely fashion on this sprawling island have made me more determined than ever to hoof it whenever possible.

It’s generally wise to have a hound along when you walk the jungle, because you will run into a variety of unexpected dangers that the presence of a good mutt can mitigate.

Many people here don’t chain their watchdogs, and these furry fellas sometimes think they own the roads, so I took Smokey the Rescue Dog (the one with anxiety) along down Anthurium Road (Google Earth it!) which plumbs the depths of Fern Acres right into the heart of Hawaiian Acres, its even less-developed cousin.

Hawaiian Acres is virtually devoid of ANY pavement, and the un-permitted and admittedly, umm, creative buildings range from Space Ship domes to well-conceived tiny houses to ramshackle wooden blights that I wouldn’t want my dog to sleep in.

I LOVE this kind of stuff!

And so does Smokey, who is a traveler like me, but who rarely gets the attention he needs because he’s pretty ragged-looking, not much of a cuddler, and pisses people off at night every time a rooster crows because he barks for half an hour afterward.

And those damn roosters crow every hour, all night long…

But I like him fine. He’s smart, obedient to a point, and will walk without whining like the little dogs do.

So down Anthurium we trotted in high dudgeon, the shiny blue sky and a nice slice of visible ocean highlighting our prospects.

Smokey likes to mark entire blocks, a tedious past-time for the guy holding the leash, so after about twenty such stops I refused to break stride any longer to accommodate his bladder.

He has a favorite mud puddle about a mile down Anthurium. It’s in the road by some friendly neighbors I met recently, when they hung a giant tie-dyed blanket, very similar to my shirt, out to dry; so we stopped for a dowsing and a fill-up, for which Smokey had future territorial plans; then back up the steep road towards home.

As we passed by the property with the big old vacated bus on it (and about which I am making active inquiries so I might write there and do yoga undisturbed) we saw a guy sitting in a truck drinking a beer. At 10:30 in the morning.

Prefer coffee, myself, but we can’t all be winners…

‘Are you okay there, friend?’ I asked, noting that he was slugging down Pabst, so I figured he HAD to be in distress…

A great, friendly, voice with a sandpaper growl in it answered quickly back: ‘Oh, yeah, doin’ great! I own this property, and I gotta clean it up to sell it. Name’s Alaska Bob, nice dog…beautiful day, ain’t it!’

And like so many others I have met here in the jungle, Alaska Bob and I became nearly instant friends.

He had recently bought a jewel of a property down the road in Hawaiian Acres, and paid for it on a credit card, which is actually sort of do-able, because you can get three acres there for less than 20 grand!

Alaska Bob intended to sell the two-acre property we were chatting on for 40-60 grand, depending on what kind of suckers took the bait once he cleaned it up.

Bob has eight or nine rusting vehicles on the back of his property; and as I have written before, vehicle disposal has been made so expensive and difficult by the current government that many Hawaiians simply remove all identifying marks and leave them to rot in the middle of the jungle.

I am, in fact, sitting in a bucket seat I removed from a Toyota pickup found on the side of a remote lava road!

I occasionally reach down to shift gears, when my thinking starts to lug…

Bob is going to take a Sawz-all and a chain saw, cut up the cars into dumpster-sized pieces, and be done with it. An elegant solution! Sorta…

There is a giant lava tube that runs for quite some length under Alaska Bob’s property, all the way down to a friend’s place in Hawaiian Acres, and he was going to use that as a selling point to persuade his friend to buy it.

A marijuana grower, his friend could use the tube to grow pakalolo in, or as an escape route in case he was raided by the cops and ‘copters that monitor the area by air each day.

I guess a fella’s gotta have a dream (mine run in other directions).

Alaska Bob lived in Anchorage, Alaska, where my sister Denise spent her career working with the poor and indigenous.

He finally realized he likes sunshine better than snow, and moved his plumbing business to da Big Island, where every other person you meet is a plumber as well.

Which is why he was sitting there drinking PBR at 10 in the morning, plotting how to make a forty thousand dollar profit from land he bought for twenty…

It also turns out Bob knows the lady who owns the abandoned bus on the property next to his, so I’ll be visiting his new property to get her phone number and increase my options.

I may call it The Winter Palace.

The most interesting things always come my way when I just go walkin’…

Me and Smokey, pretty wiped by now from the blazing sunshine and the lengthy hike, have hoofed back up the volcano to rest and ponder, and to see a little into our futures.

He’s dreaming of twenty acres he can mark to his hind-leg’s content; he dreams big.

Me?

I’ll settle for the bus.

Because that’s one helluva lot of dry storage!