From: Chapter Three

NIGHT OF THE INSECTS

“Oh, fill me up about this lovely country! You can go on writing that slop about balmy breezes and fragrant flowers, and all that sort of truck, but you’re not going to leave out them santipedes….”

––Mark Twain, Letters from Hawaii, 1866

. . . Returning to our house that evening with a can of bug spray, we put a dent in the insect population, but while I was in a deep sleep something bit me. It was the rudest awakening I have experienced in my life––as if I’d been stabbed with a penknife. I sat up, clutched my back, and let the world share my pain. My flashlight revealed a centipede wiggling towards the closet on its one hundred legs. I grabbed a shoe, but it slithered into a tiny crack in the wall.

Down in the kitchen I put lemon on the welt. I had heard that some Polynesians place a lighted cigarette close to the bitten area so that the immediate heat relieves the sting. I lit up a Café Crème cigarillo and put the red-hot tip next to the swollen bump on my flesh. A warm tea bag also gave some relief, then, ice, and, finally, a cold beer inside and out.

... Mark Twain crawled into bed one night in Hawaii, and a centipede bit him. After that he always checked between the sheets first. Twain wrote in his letters from Hawaii about a certain Captain Godfrey who got off easy, “because he always carried a bottle full of scorpions and santipedes soaked in alcohol, and whenever he got bit he bathed the place with that devilish mixture or took a drink out of it, I don’t recollect which.”

In the tropics: Bugs are a fact of life.

... Luana, the insurance lady arrived the following morning. “Aloha. Thought I’d get here early—pictures––for our files.” Although she looked pure Hawaiian, she volunteered, “I’m part Hawaiian, part Japanese, part Irish and oh, I forgot one.” She looked up at the sky and thought for a moment, then lapsed easily into pidgin. “Oh yah, Portuguee, my grandmudah, my auntie too. Befo’ she hav’ one hale here. We wen’ go here summah time. Dees ponds, da bee ponds cause all da kine bees.”

As if on cue, a couple of the large black bumblebees flew past us and landed on some beautiful orange flowers. “Des flowers, from da Kou tree, like Puako, where dis place got its name, yah,” she said. She pronounced it “Pooh-ah-ko,” accent on ko. Not “pooh-whacko,” the way most newcomers mangle the pronunciation.

I pointed to a few sugar cane stalks next to the Kou tree and told her, “I read somewhere that Puako means the stem and the tassel of the sugar cane.”

“Oh, yeah, dat too, just spell different, yah.” She shrugged “Pua means flower.”

One of my goals was to learn as many Hawaiian words as I could, but I was having a hard time with the vowel pronunciation. Nevertheless, I plunged right in with what I thought would be a compliment: “You smell like a pooh-ah-ah.”

Luana laughed so hard she might have wet her pants. Yes, we white mainlanders sure are fun to laugh at.

“Pooh-ah means flower,” she said. “But pua’a means…” Between giggles and gulps of air she spurted out, “pua’a means… .” Laughing uncontrollably again, she held her arms around her stomach and slapped her hip, as if it might help her to stop. Once she regained her composure, she said, “You say ‘I smell like pig’.”

The language would humble me more than once.

Next Chapter: Chapter 11