Sigh. It looks like I may have to revise my unpublished second novel again. I hope this passage doesnt become an obituary instead. From The Soul Keys: A teacher at the local high school once called Pāhoa “an entire dysfunctional community.” Hilo residents often refer to the citizens of Pahoa and the surrounding Puna district as “Punatics.” Some Puna residents have adopted that name as a badge of honor. This is partly a fault of geography. Literally. The East Rift Zone of Kilauea, the World’s Most Active Volcano, runs just east of town. Four Puna communities have disappeared under a layer of lava in the past three decades. Pāhoa could go tomorrow. The fact that it hasn’t in over 150 years gives some residents confidence that it probably won’t go for a while yet. For others, this same fact suggests that Pahoa is overdue to undergo a going-under. This, of course, puts a damper on real estate prices. So during Hawaii’s real estate boom 70’s and 80’s, and again in the boom between 9/11 and the Crash of ’08, when island homes often sold at thousands of dollars per square foot, Lower Puna became the haven of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, or breathe cannabis fumes, or “whatevahs.” Prospective homeowners flooded into swatches of jungle and fields of old lava with names like “Hawaiian Paradise Park,” “Orchidland Estates” and “Hawaiian Beaches,” that had been partitioned off by Honolulu investors with visions of stupid Mainland vacation lot buyers dancing in their heads. No one had actually expected anyone to live on those little squares of jungle, so there were no provisions for things like water or sewer lines. Undaunted, thousands of hardy souls erected above-ground swimming pool kits or galvanized livestock tanks and hooked them up to gutter systems, trapping East Hawai‘i’s abundant rain for their bathrooms and laundries. Middle class families built dream homes they couldn’t have afforded elsewhere, while their poorer neighbors assembled “Puna skyscrapers”: two-, or three-, or even four-story plywood shacks, whose top floors peered over the jungle to catch the trade winds and an “ocean view.” Some of the pioneers paid for plywood by starting little patches of pakalolo (marijuana) in the jungle, and sometimes those patches ended up paying for very nice houses and “pakalolo Cadillacs” -- four-wheel-drive pickups with everything -- until the local police realized how lucrative helicopter-borne marijuana raids could be. Undaunted, one local entrepreneur started selling “Birds of Puna” T-shirts, identifying the various types of helicopters used by military and law enforcement agencies. And the dowdy queen of it all was Pāhoa, the Town Where the Sixties Never Died, the capitol of the Wild West of East Hawai‘i, where hard-working hippies opened little crystal boutiques and health food stores, New Age smoothie shops and tasty ethnic restaurants, right next door to the bar and the pawn and thrift shops; where earnest-faced environmentalists peddled organic limes before the Akebono Theater by day and dealers pushed ice and crack by night; where the Puna Press, for years, ran issues containing two stories about police conspiracies and four pages of “The Bionic Toad” comics; where teachers worried about the possibility of assault, but the little combined public/school library was crowded with children the minute school let out, and the Christmas Parade one year featured one Santa who passed out candy canes, and another who tossed handfuls of (sterilized, legal) hemp seed into the crowd....
Posted on: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 16:32:40 +0000
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