Life Power Now - for gay men

Aloha,
I'm taking a much needed break after nine days of accompanying a D-9 bulldozer clearing jungle for some cottages at Kalani Kai. The D-9 is impossible to ignore. The sound hits your bones, conjuring images of Jurassic Park as treetops wave wildly about and come crashing down under the impact of a sixty ton behemoth.

The smell of crushed leaves is potent enough to lift your head, and you have to keep your footing as you scramble over boulders and tree trunks jumbled in the bulldozer's wake. You make decisions on clearing as you go, because the dozer obliterates the trails you made last week, and the land looks different than it did before. As spaces open up, you discover beautiful trees you hadn't seen even yesterday when you had passed them in the jungle by only a few yards.

The intricacies of the job are surprising. The rise and fall of the ground, the hard blue lava rock and the crushable black lava rock, native trees and invasive, non-native trees, drainage and grading: they all play a part. The bulldozer operator won over Barkus and I the instant he declared he wouldn't cut down mango or ohia trees, and his skill in cutting around trees and rock formations was a fascinating thing to watch. We met his wife and son, and learned a bit about his very interesting life.

The irony of cutting down trees was ever-present, and when we cut down an ohia tree by mistake, we placed one branch with lehua flowers on a Hawaiian altar. A few times, an owl or hawk would fearlessly fly from branch to branch to see if the bulldozer turned up anything tasty for lunch. For our part, we collected wild papayas for the kitchen to make papaya salad, in between clearing out some of the underbrush with machetes.

It was easy to feel fleeting echoes of building the Panama Canal in humid jungle, and of Roman road-building, and the feeling of any settlers clearing new land. The bulldozer sheared through personal memories, too, of childhood play with toys, and childhood fascination with machinery and power. We took the job personally, and did not dismiss the mixed emotions of disturbing what was already there in order to create something new.

By the seventh day, the project began to seem like a boot camp that I had to see to closure, even though it is only a step in a larger project. (I am, after all, by trade a project manager! ). You keep at the task until it is done, and then rest. The resting part is nice, the scratches on my legs and arms are healing quickly, and so too will the scars of the bulldozer's passage. There's plenty of room for the jungle to reassert itself, even as we carve and trim with strokes both planned and born of serendipity.

a hui hou,
Paul