The Island of the Misfit Toys
Thanksgiving was my favorite holiday. Random people gathered together to enjoy traditional food and take stock of what was important to them. I cooked for as many as twenty people from all over the world. My former spouse was a college professor and would invite foreign students and colleagues to our home for the feast.
Most important to me were my children. They were always at the top of my list, which looking back on it was probably not the best thing for them. Or, me. My home was important to me. I spent a huge chunk of my life maintaining a house on a large property. So much time spent on spit and polish. How I appeared to my friends and family was important to me. I became an award winning actress in my own family drama. I was the screenwriter, the director, the producer, the costume designer, the set designer, and the lead character. Eventually, the supporting actors started making up their own lines and my entire performance went down the tubes.
I moved to Maui in June. It has not been an easy transition on many levels. I rent a bedroom in a house, I ride a bike, and attempt to keep my life simple, I manage to clutter things up in unexpected ways.
Several months ago I attended a free concert at The Shops of Wailea. I leaned on a wall and listened to Paula Fuga play ukulele and belt out her ballads to hordes of haoles. A man walked by and I must have smiled at him. He circled the area once and came back to chat. I guess I was the most approachable target he could find. I thought he was entertaining. Keep in mind, I am a special education teacher.
He asked, “Can we get together again?”
I said, “Sure, why not?”
On The Island of Misfit Toys, the list of reasons not to give a strange man your phone number is endless. However, they usually do not call because that would take developed executive functioning skills in the frontal cortex and with all the weed, alcohol and porn these guys use, most of them are not going to be able to find the number, text a coherent sentence, or God forbid, make a call.
He called. We arranged to meet for coffee. I felt like I was still in the free zone as the chances of anyone on The Island of Misfit Toys showing up on time in an agreed upon location is about ten percent.
He showed. We talked for two hours. I laughed. The funniest part was that he wasn’t trying to be funny.
At the end of our coffee date he said, “I need to tell you that I live in my van.”
“You’re homeless?”
“No, I’m houseless. There’s a difference”.
Hawaii holds the disadvantageous distinction of having the most homeless per capita for four years in a row, according to a real estate brokerage firm based in San Mateo, California.
“You realize, don’t you, that cities on the mainland are sending their homeless here on one-way airline tickets?” A local guy on the beach informed me.
Although it makes sense that if you are going to be homeless, Hawaii would be more pleasant than Minneapolis. There is no proof that this is really happening. There is a tremendous burden on the Aloha State to provide services for the homeless, and the numbers are increasing.
My friend’s van gets a lot of attention from tourists, locals, and cops. It is tricked out with a solar panel, a generator to power his refrigerator, a custom rack on top to haul his surf board and beach chairs. Very Marty McFly. In fact, that is exactly who he reminds me of, the mad scientist in Back to the Future. I refer to him as Van Man.
Through Van Man I have learned an entire community of van and car dwellers exist. Many of them are construction workers, condo cleaners, deck hands on the boats, or waitresses and line cooks. Some of them are disabled or displaced. A few are mentally ill and in need of meds and supervision. Surprisingly, some are houseless by choice. All of them are on the move. They cannot stay long in one spot. The cops visit in the middle of the night, ask for I.D. and tell them to move along to another location.
The housing situation on Maui has reached a desperate level. Rent has increased nearly fifty percent in the last five years. People are renting couches for $400.00 to $600.00 per month off craigslist. A couch, in a living room. A colleague told me that getting an apartment in Kihei is like being accepted into Harvard.
Van Man, my new friend has achieved his forty year dream of living in a van, with an ocean front view every night.
This year for Thanksgiving I decided to volunteer for Hope Chapel, a large church with many community outreach programs. They serve around 300 people a lovely turkey dinner. As I cut pies donated by Costco, I reflected on past Thanksgivings. My favorite recipes, how I enjoyed the time spent in my lovely kitchen preparing food for family and friends, extending hospitality to interesting visitors.
After all pies were sliced, I stayed to eat a plate of turkey. Van Man appeared, and sat down. I noticed a large older woman stomping toward the table. She held a plate of pumpkin pie with a mountain of whipped cream. She was a woman on a mission, and she and had crazy written all over her.
She stopped at our table, looked at Van Man and huffed, “I thought you might need face cream.”
One of us is going to be wearing that pie. I quickly left my plate of turkey on the table.
Later, Van Man explained that she was one of his good friends from the van community, and her meds were not working. One of many who ended up on Maui without resources or a plan, and now lives off the state.
On The Island of the Misfit Toys there are many eccentric characters including, Jesus Man who spends every day, all day walking the streets, wearing black trash bags for clothing and duct taped gunny sacks on his feet. He doesn’t interact much. Shopping Cart Man pushes a borrowed shopping cart from Foodland up and down South Kihei Road, wearing a silk tie and dapper bowler hat over his long grey tresses. He is most chivalrous. He told me, “You can be anything you want to be when you grow up.” One day, he stopped both lanes of traffic so I could cross. The Chicken Man carries his pet poultry and talks loudly to the bird. The Purple Prayer Lady drives a purple prayer van, rides a purple bike, and wears purple clothes head to toe. She has an orb on her turban to receive signals from the divine. I saw her playing a banjo outside the post office. I learned she is a music therapist. She did make me smile.
Of course, there are the tweekers, and truly destitute in the ranks of homeless, houseless, hopeless people on Maui. They do not make me smile.
Van Man invited me to go camping in Hana over Thanksgiving weekend. I am a camper. And, I missed my daughters. They were having a holiday weekend together without me. Flying to Oregon was out of the question. My job has been particularly exhausting from day one. Fresh scenery and a road trip seemed like a good idea.
I forgot to check the weather on the east side of the island, and my judgement.
As I loaded my gear into the van and climbed into the front seat, I felt like a golden retriever, head out the window, ears flapping in the wind. The van rattled along, as items rolled around in the back. It was filled with his stuff and nothing was secured for the climb up the mountain. It was distracting, but not dangerous.
Van Man suggested we go the back way to Hana. We would camp at Kīpahulu in Haleakalā National Park. It is near the The Pipiwai Trail which cuts though a massive and astonishing bamboo forest. First we would travel a long road through a variety of ecosystems. About a half hour out of Kula, the tire pressure light came on in the van. No gas station along the way, and the last pit stop did not have an air compressor. “Never fear,” Van Man assured me as somewhere in the mobile hardware store was an air compressor he could locate if needed.
The wind came up. Gusts nearly swept the vehicle off the road. Van Man gripped the steering wheel. It was like being on a ship at sea, tossed side to side. We hit a bump. Van Man slammed on the brakes. Water and ice flowed down the windshield on the passenger side.
“Is it raining?” I asked craning my neck to see the sky, now dark with angry looking clouds.
“When I hit that bump, the lid to the cooler must have been knocked off.” The cooler was strapped to the top rack Beverly Hillbilly style along with who knows what else.
“What on earth is in the cooler?”
“A case of beer, a bottle of vodka and tequila.”
“For two days?”
“The road might close because of landslides. We could be stuck here for a week or more. Hasagawa’s General Store would be cleaned out in 20 minutes.”
“Really? I’m calling bullshit on that.”
“Anyway, I hope to get you to take your top off.” He looked over and gave me a wink.
“I might have had this conversation forty-five years ago. Haven’t you learned anything since high school?”
“No.”
“I have.” I scooted toward the door an inch. “Top stays on.”
I am a sixty-one, I honestly don’t remember the last time anyone was at all interested in removing my top. And, I don’t enjoy people who haven’t learned anything. I realized, I might have made a poor decision.
He whipped the van around to look for the cooler lid. Everything in the back rolled to one side and it felt as if the top heavy vehicle were on two wheels and might turn over. He screeched to a stop, everything in the back rolled forward. More water sloshed down the windshield. I gripped the door handle and fought the wind to open the door to help him look for the lid. There was a fifty foot ravine with rock walls on both sides.
“I think its history.”
“That is unfortunate. There is forty pounds of ice in that cooler.”
Soon it will be forty pounds of water, pouring down the windshield every time he steps on the brake.
Finally we arrived at the campground. It was windy, overcast and the grey sky drizzled. The grass was nearly up to my knees. Happily no snakes in Hawaii. Van Man chose a spot to set up camp. He touched the metal grill and the rusted pipe gave way and toppled over. He moved next door closer to the latrine. I looked at the sky and grabbed my rain gear.
Van Man climbed on top of the van and seized a cold beer for each of us. Then handed me the beach chairs. We opened them up to sit at the same moment the sky opened up to pour. We were drenched in seconds. With the gale force wind, the rain came down sideways. It was not “let’s dance in the rain.” It was “take cover.” There was no place to go except the front seat of the van. The back was a bachelor’s pad in the least complimentary way possible.
Over the next couple of hours we pitched a tent. It was filled with water. It leaked. Through a series of contraptions Van Man blew up an air mattress full of air, it leaked. I had to hand it to him. He did not give up, he did not get angry, he continued as if everything was going to work out just fine. During a lull in the maelstrom, he decided to build a fire in the grill. Whatever he dumped on that wet wood made a whoosh and a fire roared.
I was cold and uncomfortable. I needed sleep to rejuvenate my body from weeks of work and stress. I felt like the trip home may not be a wise choice in the dark. Wait for daylight. I donned all my clothes, wrapped myself in a sarong and climbed in the tent. The wind howled, the waves crashed, the tent flapped, the rain blew in, I did not sleep one minute. My companion snored softly. In the middle of the night we were slanted toward the middle of the mattress, touching the ground. I was desperate for warmth and snuggled in and waited for morning to show up.
“Coffee.” Was all I could manage to whisper, and through some miracle he produced a cup pf black gold.
“Look, I have had it. You don’t have to leave, but I am hitching it home.” My throat hurt, my head hurt and in spite of freezing, I was sweating.
“There is one more thing I want to do.” He replied. “It’s a surprise.”
He had the enthusiasm of a five year old. “Just give me five minutes then follow the trail towards the water.” He gathered stuff from the van and walked off. I finished my coffee, went to the latrine and walked the trail which was a thick black mud. I found Van Man under a tree. He had strung a swinging chair over a branch. “Just another minute and then you can watch the water in a chair.”
I walked to the edge of the cliff and looked down. The water was crashing onto the lava rock shooting spray twenty feet into the air. The grey sky was ominous, it was going to open up and dump another deluge any minute. I looked down at my feet covered in black goo. I wanted to get the hell out of there not swing in a chair.
I heard a snap and a thud behind me. I turned around to see Van Man on the ground, tangled in rope. The tree branch snapped and dangled from the trunk.
“Are you okay?”
“I hit my head pretty hard.” He replied, stunned.
I helped him up and said, “I’m calling it right now.”
“I concur.” Was his reply.
After telling a wise friend this story, she said, “Sequoia let this be the last crazy story. Please stop doing this to yourself, say no to crazy.”
I concur.
I have several things to be thankful for, I arrived home from the camping trip in one piece, I have been reminded to say no to crazy, which on The Island of the Misfit Toys can be tricky because there is so much of it, and my top stayed on.
Thanksgiving is behind me, I can hardly wait for Christmas on The Island of the Misfit Toys.
