Ka'u & Kona Coffee

St. Jude's Guatemalan neighbor has a small roasting operation. He showed it to me today. he biuts most oof his beans from growers all over the island then roasts and packages them to order for vendors here and on the mainland. He paclaged up two ro three pounds each of Kona, Ka'u naturalmente (a rought version, with lots of black ones that have to be removed before roasting), and Hawai'ian Blend, which is very clean, prepared for mainland sale. he added a pound of fine Ka'u peaberry and then refused any hint of payment. (At retail prices this would be well over $200 worth!)

I let him do this because arguing is indecent, people know how to treat clergy in his culture, and he is actually doing quite well. His shop is pretty extensive, he sells all over the world, and his house, though modest, looks quite comfortable, and he appears to have a swimming pool for his three boys! He has been here in Ocean View for the past twelve years.

Mahina

If you ever find yourself in Captain Cook, HI (just south of Kona on the Big Island), don’t miss the Mahina Café, and be sure to try the Hawai’ian Plate – a tasting menu of indigenous foods – mostly pork, cooked in various ways that taste really distinct. Mahina means “moon”, as our server explained. Rachel is a native Hawai’ian, who is very well-informed about the state’s history. The indigenous people have a lunar calendar, much like the plains Indians, in which each moon has a name. Together with the stars, especially the Pleiades, the moons guide the agricultural life. (We are now in the Harvest Moon.)

                Rachel explained that pigs came to the islands (along with dogs, taro, and bananas) with the very first settlers, whose origin is unknown – somewhere in Polynesia, around 1500 years ago.

Replica of ancient Polynesian ship

The various dishes in the sampling plate are traditional to the luau, and traditionally cooked underground.

Upper right: shredded pork and beef (laulau), wrapped first in taro leaf and then in ti leaf for underground cooking.

Lower-left, shredded pork. White cube, taro-root flan.

One of them is smoked with the wood of a Hawai’an tree similar to mesquite. It produces prickly thorns, however, and the native joke is that the Europeaans brought it not just to feed the cattle with its beans, but to force the Hawai’ians not to go barefoot!

                I told Rachel about Bishop Whipple and our devotion to Queen Emma. She seemed happy to hear it. She observed that the conquest of Hawai’i followed immediately upon the subjugation of the plains Indians, and the history (deracination, linguistic suppression, deportation, and boarding schools) was similar. She also pointed out that by the end of the 19^th century, there were only about 40,000 Hawai’ians left. Since most of the were eope of some meansa, there are plenty of pretenders, nowadays, to chiefdom (ai’i) and royalty. Most well-known is Prince Quentin Kawananakoa,

Vesture is royal, rather than academic, I think (see below).

Also heir to one of the largest mainlander planters (James Campbell), Prince Kawananakoa was a member of the State Legislature and erstwhile minority leader. He has never been elected to national office, perhaps because he is a Republican, which seems a little odd for a royal pretender!

                Possibly because of this kind of anomaly, a cousin of Kamehameha the Great, five times removed, Prince Noa Kalokuokamile  (Kalokuokamile  III) is supported by some. .

Coffee Roasting and Witness Protection

So  it does rain here. Technically a desert, this part of the island got plenty of rain in the last couple of days - cold and grey, too. Anyway, it's still beautiful.

My friend, Sharif, went to visit friends at the north end and came back with the news (rumor) that Ocean View has a lot of Witness Protection Program clients. I wonder, if it's so well known, whether it's really that safe for them! OceanView also has a reputation of being armed to the teeth!

Who knew?

We roasted some green Ka'u peaberries today - really good.

It has been at least 20 years since I roasted my own coffee During that time, I acquired a perfect roasting-pan - a heavy aluminum, camp-style, folding omlette pan, with the wooden-insulated handles extending "from the diameter, not the radius" as the late Don Lohr (our coffee guru) used to say.



These are somewhat hard to come by nowadays. This was the first time I had used the pan, which my friend Virginia Howell got for me at the Berkeley Ashby Bart Saturday flea-market many years ago. It works like a dream. McKinnie Place has an outdoor, gas BBQ which was also perfect.

Only a week t go here in Ocean View, and then I will spend a few days looking around Hawai'i before returning to Tucson. then I plan to go to Berkeley for a couple of weeks.

Showers

St Jude's offers free showers for all comers on Saturday mornings, complete with a complimentary soup lunch. Lots of takers, because many people live here without running water. There are many Marshal Islanders, who are among the most destitute.



These kids look just like our patrons.

Ka Lae

South Point is the imaginatively named southernmost point in the United States. At latitude N. 18.9111, which places it roughly parallel to northern Yemen and Taiwan. It is also a place where poor crazy people jump off the cliff. The park service considerately provides a ladder for them to climb back up,

Prescinding from these delights, I contented myself with admiring the incredible blue of the Pacific here a short way from the house at St. Jude's.

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Later, I listened to Amy Goodman online, to learn about the kick-off of The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald's new online journal in collaboration with Jeff Scahill, Laura Poitras, and the E-bay magnate. Everyone should follow it. Or listen to or watch the Democracy Now interview with them (scroll down to third video).

Drove up the east coast to a black-sand beach (below). Beautiful day. Typical view, above.

As you can see, the sand is pulverized lava. Nice little waves - not much surf for the real aficionados, but great for children.

Kilaulea

Kilaulea is a volcano in its own right, erupting out of the side of Mauna Loa near the sea. It doesn't look like this right now, although it is permanently belching brimstone into the air in huge quantities. I tasted the Vog (yes, tasted) yesterday when I drove up to Hilo to pick up my friend Sharif at the airport. On the way back, we stopped in at Volcanoes National Park, where a nice ranger directed us to the caldera of the active volcano, which now looks like this:

At night it is supposed to be pretty red - reflecting the magma below. From time to time it spills over and they have to evacuate a town. 

But now there is nothing much between it and the ocean.

HI Rt. 11 (the Kamehameha Highway, which circles the island) runs north of it, just up the mountainside. 

There are plenty of chthonic spectacles everywhere, including dozens of steam vents that make the landscape look pretty infernal - like Yellowstone only more so - steam rising out of the ground everywhere you look.

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I had my first "bible study" today, with the men's group. Very interesting people. It was a privilege to hear their spiritual journeys. We didn't pore over text so much, but talked about our own experience and convictions, with occasional reference to the Holy Scripture.