more vermin

There are a few non-tickling terrorists on the island.

Cane spiders are really big spiders with black and yellow stripes. The look of them is enough to scare you, although they are harmless. Their webs will one day be the new unbreakable fiber of choice for clothing that never wears out.

Slugs are bigger and more plentiful here, I think. They also pop in a disgusting way when you forget your slippahs and walk on one at night. No forget da slippahs.

Mice and rats. We live on the edge of the jungle. Civilization skirts the other edge of the jungle, but between them and us is a swath of wilderness sufficient to house rodentia. The field mice are so cute. Mrs. Brisby and the gang don't bother me much. In fact, I was willing to live with her, but she got pretty brash and was begging from the table beside the dog on the morning before a big sleepover with eight teenage girls. We decided to put out sticky traps. Fifteen mice later, the mickocide was over... or so we thought. One little sleepover guest had a bandaid on her finger the next morning from when she tried to free yet another mouse from the glue and the ungrateful thing bit her.

Once we cleared out the little guys (the mice, not the girls), the big ones moved in. They would run along the garage door rail and up into the attic. One nested in the linen closet and stared down the dog and me late at night when we tried to shoo it outside. Another moved down the window screen in a weird silhouette backed by a moonlit sidewalk, disappearing behind the refrigerator except for scuttling noises when I turned on the light. They would leave patches of grey hair in the rat-sized glue traps, along with hate notes and vile warnings scratched into the surface. But we couldn't catch 'em.

Until last night. Last night a rat got stuck right in our bathroom trap, and it dragged the plastic tray over the tile floor, flopping and scratching all night. Sometimes I would hear its watery chirping noises to the other similar noises outside (I had thought all this time that this noise was from crickets. It is a chorus of rats...) Sometimes this one just screamed. I didn't want to deal with it while it was in high energy. I waited and then fell asleep, having imagined it to have grown to the size of the bathroom itself, with only one paw stuck in the trap so it couldn't turn the door handle to come out and slap me with the glue trap...

In the morning, there it was. It wasn't ugly like many rats. It was a beautiful huge mouse with a really long tail. David was sweet enough to wrestle it to the ground, hog tie it, and drag it out to the rubbish. Isn't the trash barrel supposed to be rat heaven?

ants

I'm sitting here blogging about the Real Hawaii, how it ain't all paradise, but I struggle to be convincing. It's lovely here. It really is a dream place to live. (And then the qualifications come pouring in: dream place once you figure out how to afford the electricity, gas, and grocery prices; find somewhere that you can pay for to live; find a way to make an honest living that doesn't eat up all the time you'd hope to spend on the beach or in the water....)

And as I'm telling about the climate, the variety, I feel a tickle on my shoulder. It's a little tickle. If Eskimos have a gazillion words for snow, Hawaiians should have that many for the feeling of various bug tickles.

There's the Phantom Tickle (the worst of all). It moves around, sometimes bites, and has no resolution of a known etiology. Onset and relief are indeterminate.

There's the Ant Tickle. Take a pencil and move one of your arm hairs back and forth. That's an ant tickle. If you're not holding a pencil and moving your hairs, there's an ant on you.

There's the Centipede Tickle. If corn cobs had fingers to drum on you lightly, that's what it would feel like to be climbed by a centipede. This tickle is sometimes followed by a screaming pain in the vicinity of the previous 10,000 finger massage.

There's the Scorpion Tickle. I don't know... never had it, but they're bound to crawl on you, right?

There's the Kona Kruiser Tickle. Cockroaches the size of trophy Medjool Dates move very quickly, so the tickle is more like a panicked rush across your body. Although harmless, the karmic wave of anxiety from both the bug and yourself leaves a trail of electric residual tickle like no other. The world suddenly seems hurried.

There's the Ant Tickle. This one is so common that it should really be listed between each of the others, as a representation of frequency of occurrence.

There's the Fly or Mosquito Tickle. This are so rare in Hawaii that it has led many to tout Hawaii as bug free. It's a lie. There are bugs, but just fewer nagging flocks of flies and mosquitoes than what you'd get on a mainland summer day. The mosquitoes are clumsy enough here that they rarely can sneak up on you like on the mainland. You feel them bumping into you like you're a sliding glass door and they're looking for a way out.

There's the Gekko Tickle. While technically not a bug and not a tickle, this sensation is weird enough to merit an attempt at description. Take a cold hotdog and slap it on your arm. That's the gekko landing on you. Then take the Kona Kruiser Tickle and add rubber boots for the rest of the effect. What a rush! No matter how much you love the lizards, it'll get a howl out of you when they land and run off of you.

For a taste of the complete relaxation that a night or two of paradise can give you, simply mix only one or two of the above tickles with a relentless humid heat. Five minutes is sufficient to feed the Phantom Tickle generator and to wake the next morning with that "I've just slept in hell" look.

weather or not

We're tossing around the idea of buying some land with friends and all building our homes near each other. Talk about choosing your neighbors!

The place I'd like best is called Kaloko. When I first came to live on the Big Island, I came here from a huge ranch in New Mexico (10,000 acres, with neighboring ranches as large or much larger.) All that to say that I was accustomed to elbow room.

Hawaii is compact. Not like Japan, I hear, but cozy. You don't want to bend over at the same time in this town, 'cause we all live pretty close and something could get bumped. So, coming from lots of air space to an island led me to what I called Cabin Fever, and later heard someone call it Rock Fever. Whatever fever it was, it got me bad. I searched maps for any road that led away from civilization. I found one (there are many, but I didn't find them yet). It was the road up into Kaloko.

It's a rainforest trek right up from the desert heat of Kona. All of a sudden, you're in the woods, and then you're in fog, and then you're up there with the bird noises and clouds below you. It's magical.

Within 30 minutes of where I now live and sizzle in the Kona heat, I could potentially be living in the 65's and wearing the things I've knitted for mainland family or trips. That's Hawaii and the weather here for you. There are so many climate zones and regions that vary both by altitude and geography. You can find it all here, if you know where to look (and are willing to pay for the more popular of it.)

I wonder, would living in a cool elevation change my love of Hawaii and the air that feels like a hug? Would the humidity moulder my affections? And what bugs prefer the higher climes, where my centipedes and scorpions (hopefully) will not go?