Up Kahuna Road

I did not grow up on the farm. We werenʻt allowed to live there, a stipulation of the lease from the state. I was raised there, though. The farm raised me. I spent parts of every day there for 10 years, spanning the ages of 7-17. When I moved away for college, so many tacked together pieces of our family, the farm included, began to fall apart.

Can I describe the farm, even? What is it now? What does it mean to tell someone about the farm, a place that no longer exists, barely ever did?

I can start with facts: The farm is (was) up on Kahuna Road, with Pantalon’s dirt road wrapping the other side. There is a river there, Kapa’a Stream, and a valley, also the random decaying foundations of buildings I have never seen but often imagined, and also the old bunker on the hill. Makaleha stands over the valley, the river, the farm. It is green and black and brown, tall, dripping mist into waterfalls into the stream down in the valley on its way to the ocean.

The farm is a physical place still, though few people know it as the place that I mean. The farm is something else also, surrounded not by roads and landmarks but by 10 years marked on a timeline in the minds of five people, with hurricanes on either side. It is a phrase that calls to reality a place, a time, a dragging, sucking, sick sunny raining feeling filled with goats, post holes, and the piling of rocks.

We built a barn or it was already there. We fortified and tended the pigpens, the goat corrals. We tilled the soil and moved the rocks. We bent and twisted barbed and hog and electric wire around the edges and the interiors of the layers of the 10 acres of the farm. I hammered bent nails straight, taking them from one bucket to another. I sorted nuts and bolts and washers, tried to avoid getting fingers caught in the vegetable washer, mixed and sprayed gallons of weed-killer, no gloves no mask no adult supervision.

I remember a massive mud puddle, near the first barn. We played in the puddle often, with gi joes and hot wheels. We searched for and avoided the toads and their pearl string laces of eggs. When the sun shone for days, the puddle dried and captured our toys along with the toads; all were excavated after each heavy rain by our small searching hands, tender from youth and not yet living life.

There was an old tub, maybe two, outside the pigpen where Sarah sat to scold the sows and piglets. When I pulled prawns from the river I set them in the tubs and installed automatic water fillers and air circulators; the water turned black anyway and I donʻt know what we did with all the prawns and oʻopu I put there.

The burn pile was near the pigpens and tubs, part way down the hill where the road wrapped around a steep outcropping bringing tractors to the valley and the river. We burned so many things. Feed bags, rotted lumber, tin cans, batteries, tires, dead goats, limbs from fallen albizia trees, old fireworks and shotgun shells. The smoke carried away on the wind but the smell lingers. The smoke lifted, black with diesel and dead animals and tire rubber, billowing up, offending the blue skies and Makalehaʻs green cliffs. We never burned enough though to really get rid of all the filth. That followed us to other storage places, forgotten until something tumbles down on our heads when we open a door, hear a certain sound, utter a specific word or question.

We always had goats. Henry, Henrietta, Mama, Daisy, and the others. Some of these we killed for our neighbors, tying them up, draining their blood at the throat so their screams turned to wet gargling as the bucket filled. We exchanged these animals for the sausage from the blood and entrails. We often had chickens. These we hung from their feet so that I could open their throats with a buck knife, their white and yellow heads turning red then black. I asked my dad about what my teacher said at recess, that we ran around like chickens with our heads cut off. In answer, he took one to the huge stump in the barnyard, slapped it down and chopped its head off in a flash. The now un capitated bird flopped and wiggled but disappointingly did not run.

One year, the valley was full of sweet corn, taller than me and my sister. One year, the rocky front pasture filled with marigold, thousands of them, deep red and orange, a blanket from fence line to fence line. For a birthday once, we laid out a bunch of old tarps on the hillside in the horse paddock. We twisted all the hoses together to reach from the barn to the top of the tarp and let the water flow, rain water from Makaleha actually, or so the county always tells us. The makeshift slip n slide worked but the rocks under the grass still pierced the fabric and eventually our skin. I remember the rocks; I remember the message communicated to the gathered friends by those tarps when I think about that birthday.

After the second hurricane, the first barn fell on the land cruiser. We built a new one, closer to the valley’s edge, closer to the papaya and overlooking the sweet corn, the curve of the river peaking through hau bush and lantana, like the curves of the woman I often nervously watched at Kealia while I was learning about surfing and women.

And what is down there now, in the valley, near the river, under the tree cover of jungle? Friends, loneliness, days spent, prawn traps, mud, coconut meat, moss and rock dams, Pantalonʻs dead wife, orange and green sludge in the slow corners of the overflow channels. And what is there now?

River rock. Silt. Water. Me. Some part of me.

Jonathon Medeiros, former director of the Kauaʻi Teacher Fellowship, has been teaching and learning about Language Arts and rhetoric for nearly 20 years with students on Kauaʻi and he frequently writes about education, equity, and the power of curiosity. He believes in teaching his students that if you change all of your mistakes and regrets, you’d erase yourself.