Spirit of Aloha | Features | January/February 2008

My Good Life On The Big Island
By Bill Harby


On the volcano, there’s a little cottage with a hot tub, occasional poker games and native forest that hurts your eyes

PHOTO: G. BRAD LEWIS PHOTO: BILL HARBY

I bet you’d hate it where I live. Un­less you like rain and chilly temperatures and nerd scientists, many of whom need haircuts, and wacky artists wearing blatantly colorful clothing, chances are you would not find true happiness living atop soggy Kīlauea volcano on Hawai‘i Island. For one thing, there are none of the modern conveniences that civilized people take for granted—no bank, no 24-hour supermarket, not even a McDonald’s or a Star­bucks, if you can believe that. And the ocean? Hawai‘i = ocean, right? Sorry. You’ve got to drive half an hour to get to the beach from here. However, you can still drown—did I mention it rains a lot?

And, oh, yeah, there’s the little matter of rivers of molten lava gushing down the hill a few miles away. Four years ago, after 23 happy years in Honolulu, I quit a great job and left behind wonderful friends for . . . this?

I live near Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park, just outside Volcano Village, which, you have to admit, is a far cooler name for a tiny township than, say, Slurry­ville. We’re at about the 4,000 foot elevation level, near the summit of Kīlauea, which has been spewing lava since 1983. My property is uphill from the eruption zone, and even my home insurance company doesn’t seem overly concerned that my house could suddenly turn into a giant campfire visible from the Google satellites.

To this day, when I occasionally re­turn to Honolulu for work or to shop for a new toaster oven, I’ll run across some old acquaintance who’ll smile and put his hand on my shoulder in that particular way sophisticated city people do to idiots who’ve voluntarily traded in the vibrant metropolis for the sticks. “So how do you like it out there?” they’ll ask, making “out there” sound like I’ve moved to one of Jupiter’s moons. They’re obviously hoping I’ve come to my senses and realized my mistake. Of course, they’re right. Moving here four years ago was really stupid, so I hope you’ll heed my warning.

Including the one about earthquakes. Little house-rocking quakes come along about as often as some other communities have barn dances. Except for the 6.7 bad boy in 2006, usually our temblors cause no damage, except perhaps to the psyches of our pets. If I clomp up the spiral staircase and make the house shake a little, my cat, Loki, bolts outside in a San Francisco minute.

Which is nothing compared to the ab­ject horror apparent in this city cat’s bulging eyes the first time he saw the really big rats (wild pigs) that sometimes come grunting out of the forest. Yes, we actually have wild pigs roaming about our neck of the woods, including boars with Lord of the Flies evil in their black, beady little eyes. One time a sow, a boar and their cute little piglets (what’s the word for “veal” when referring to pigs?) sauntered up my driveway like a family strolling in Cen­tral Park. As soon as they saw me, they took off like I was Jimmy Dean with a sausage machine, and I haven’t seen them since.

So, yeah, it’s kind of gnarly up here at this outpost of civilization. Plus, it rains frequently.

I’m not making that up. I am an official rain reporter for the monthly village newsletter. That we have a bunch of neighbor­hood rain gaugers ought to tell you something. In the past 12 months, 89.6 inches of rain fell on my property. I have to confess that there are a number of advantages to this. I have never, ever watered the grass, and yet it grows like hair at a Rogaine party. Everyone here has a rain catchment tank be­cause there’s no piped-in county water. With my 5,000-gallon tank I can take steaming baths and hot showers every hour on the hour, which I sometimes do during our chilly winter months when the mercury plummets into the low 50s or be­low. The woodstove gets lit a lot during winter, too, and even though lying on the floor with a snifter of cognac and staring into the flames through that little stove window is better than anything on TV, we’re still talking pioneer-era heating technology.

I’m not making that up. I am an official rain reporter for the monthly village newsletter. That we have a bunch of neighbor­hood rain gaugers ought to tell you something. In the past 12 months, 89.6 inches of rain fell on my property. I have to confess that there are a number of advantages to this. I have never, ever watered the grass, and yet it grows like hair at a Rogaine party. Everyone here has a rain catchment tank be­cause there’s no piped-in county water. With my 5,000-gallon tank I can take steaming baths and hot showers every hour on the hour, which I sometimes do during our chilly winter months when the mercury plummets into the low 50s or be­low. The woodstove gets lit a lot during winter, too, and even though lying on the floor with a snifter of cognac and staring into the flames through that little stove window is better than anything on TV, we’re still talking pioneer-era heating technology.

So why, you may ask, did a hip, hap­pening, urban professional such as myself trade in good work, friends and home for the rustic life on an erupt­ing volcano where it rains every 10 minutes?

It certainly wasn’t to escape Hono­lulu. I loved living there, and I still love visiting. I wasn’t fleeing the big-box stores marching across the land, the Sa­tur­day morning rush-hour traffic or the stink-eyes from punks in souped-up econ­omy cars. I just wanted to live in my own place. In Honolulu I was rent­ing; and though I had a lovely, ramshackle house in a preferred neighborhood (Mānoa Valley) at a ridiculously low rent, I had the irresistible compulsion to live in my own house, by which I mean, of course, the bank’s own house. For a while, I kept an eye out for an apart­ment to buy in Honolulu. This wouldn’t have been hard for many people. There were affordable apartments, and also some really cool apartments, but never the twain did meet.

Inevitably, my mind kept returning to the lovely little forest cottage that the bank and I already owned. I’d designed it myself, with huge windows, floors of local woods and rough-hewn slate, an open-beam ceiling and a big tub next to more big windows, all surrounded by na­tive forest. For four or five years I used this small, beautiful house as a week­end getaway while sorta-kinda run­ning it as a bed and breakfast. I’d have two or three guests a month, enough to nearly cover the mortgage and serve as a super tax write-off. I figured I’d probably move here when I got old and senile and didn’t know any better.

But finally, I got sick of looking at cinder­block apartments the size of shoeboxes that cost double what my house cost, so I let myself be seduced. I flung aside my job and secure future, and no doubt any chance for true happiness.

Because, as I say, it was all a horrible mistake. Now here I am living a tight­rope freelance life, working from home with a 10-second downward spiral commute from the loft to my desk, sitting here day after day, staring out at the forest through my huge windows, with pes­ky neighborhood friends always calling to invite me to a party or for a starlit al­fres­co hot tub, or to see the pigs they’ve just captured. Plus there’s the farmers’ market, chaotic with impossibly cheerful neighbors pouring over embarrassingly large piles of cheap, fresh local goods. Or there’s the week­end poker game, or indoor miniature golf (indoor be­cause, as you may have heard, it rains a lot up here), or real golf on a course that’s so green it hurts your eyes, though it’s worth it because you can some­times get extra yardage on a drive that skips over the soggy fairway like a flat stone on a stream. There are the poetry slams at the art center, or live jazz at the Lava Lounge, or Hawaiian music concerts at the theatre, or 15-year-old scotch by the fire at Kīlauea Lodge, or Bordeaux with neighbors from France, or Thai food at the Thai restaurant that is actually named “Thai Thai” just in case you don’t get it the first time. There are fencing lessons at the commu­nity center, hiking among the lava tree molds and Pele’s tears in the na­tional park, or just standing naked at 3 a.m. before huge windows under a full moon that’s so bright on a clear night your whole body glows.

As you can see, without a vibrant me­trop­olis, entertainment options are limited around Volcano Village. Of course, we do hold an eponymous ace, our very own erupting volcano, to which many of us have been drawn like those luna­tics in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. However, again, a warning is in order. They call Kīlauea a “friendly” volcano. Don’t you believe it. Sure, sometimes you can hike out toward the ever-shifting lava flows and stand right next to spreading molten lava, witnessing the sublime, ongoing birth of our planet be­fore your eyes. But it’s a lot of work! And totally unnecessary. Face it, this is why they invented the Discovery Channel.

I think you get the idea by now. This is an unpleasant place. And I haven’t even told you yet about the biggest pain of all: the people. There are a lot of seriously weird people here. Outwardly, they seem like functioning human be­ings making their way in the world, but they are all so . . . sincere. And they all seem to be doing this or that community service and have interesting hobbies. It’s disgusting.

Many of them are even federal em­ployees—rangers, geologists, anthropologists and their colleagues at Hawai‘i Vol­canoes National Park. You can identify these people even when they’re not wearing their Smokey the Bear hats, be­cause the left sides of their brains bulge noticeably and they can carry on lengthy, informed conversations about anything from tectonic evolution to Hawaiian gods. Such showoffs.

Many of them are even federal em­ployees—rangers, geologists, anthropologists and their colleagues at Hawai‘i Vol­canoes National Park. You can identify these people even when they’re not wearing their Smokey the Bear hats, be­cause the left sides of their brains bulge noticeably and they can carry on lengthy, informed conversations about anything from tectonic evolution to Hawaiian gods. Such showoffs.

Counter-balancing these rational scientific types are diverse artists with oversized right brains. Every day they wake up, have breakfast and create amazing art while brushing their teeth. Though mostly house-trained, these artists persist in having their own ideas about almost everything. More showoffs.

You can see that where I live leaves something to be de­sired. To summarize: It’s a rainy, cold, convenience-challenged outpost on top of an erupting volcano where a bunch of weirdos live. If you’re looking for The Good Life, obviously, you’d better look elsewhere.

BILL HARBY is a longtime Hawai‘i-based writer, humorist, editor and photographer, and a frequent contributor to SPIRIT OF ALOHA.

Features Archives