Maunu
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The old long retired tour guide tells me that he had gone up ahead of his group one morning to make certain that it was safe for them to wade in the pond at the falls, just on the outskirts of Honolulu. He wanted to make sure that the area was safe, being that there had been a heavy rainstorm the whole week before. When approaching the falls, he came upon a little Hawaiian girl squatting near the pond, with her fishing pole dipping in and out of the water. He also saw a young man next to her laying on his back but he couldn’t see his face because of the close proximity of the little girl sitting near him.
“I knew very well that there wasn’t no fish in the pond but I thought I would ask what she was fishing for anyway.” The old guide said that the little Hawaiian girl answered that she'd caught several Moi and was waiting for a few more to bite. He looked around and noticed that the little Hawaiian girl had no bucket with which to put her fish in.
"Where's your Moi?" He thought how sad that she caught some fish and then through her own absent-mindedness, let the fish jump back into the pond.
"I already ate the ones I caught, now I'm catching more." For someone so small she was very irritable like she didn't want to be bothered, but the old guide said he had to ask, "What kind of bait are you using?"
He took a long deep breath just then and choked back his tears. His lower lip quivered and his eyes were turning red as he looked off into the distance. "That little Hawaiian girl stood up and brought her small little pole out of the water and held up the mono-filament thread with the bait on the end of the hook so I could see it. It was a pair of eyes, human eyes......that's when I saw that the young man laying on the ground..... they'd been pulled out...his eyes.…she.....was using it for bait..."
I recoiled back into my swivel chair and used my feet to push myself away, but from what? There were only myself and the old guide in my office and no one else. “She was so fast that girl.….so fast.” He looked at his open palms before him as if he couldn’t believe the story now even as he repeated the incident to himself but his memory wouldn’t let him hide it away. “It happened so quickly.…she dropped her bamboo pole...she grabbed that poor young man by his collar and jumped into the pool and took the body with her like it weighed nothing...and then just her eyes surfaced from across the pond looking right at me.….her eyes turned yellowish green...I can’t...I can’t even say the name of the place...I can’t even drive past it these days.”
That’s all he would say regarding the incident. I could see that the memory lived in his mind, replaying itself over and over again. It crippled him emotionally and psychologically, it changed the way he looked at the Hawaiian environment forever. “I wanted to get away from my old life in the mainland, start new. I figured why not learn a little about these islands and be a tour guide.…yeah. I was pretty full of myself up until then. That day taught me that I don’t know shit, but I learned how small I really am and I know my place in the pecking order, that’s for damned sure.”
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The moral of this story could be that all of us who live in Hawai’i must know our place in the overall scheme of things because there are elements that still exist here which are greater than we are and far beyond our comprehension or control. Or, could the moral of this story be that one should never question a little Hawaiian girl as to her fishing methods at a lonely pond near a waterfall? Especially when she is bereft of bait, and you are the only other person with her.
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