Sheltering in Place #2 (21st-Century Echoes of Taylor Camp)
The beauty, peace and quiet. The quality of light. The pure taste of spring water. The focused concentration of the hunt. Eating only fresh and organic food. Watching rainbows form against the folding cliffs. Waking in my hammock at first light, crossing the sparkling irrigation channels on the way to breakfast and eating the purple-sweet Surinam cherries growing on their banks.
This sounds like a dream, or a utopian fantasy, but these were details of daily life during the three weeks I spent living in Kalalau Valley as a guest of the residents there. Growing and hunting/gathering food, cutting firewood, carrying water, repairing and maintaining irrigation systems, garden walls, trails, and shelters while often hiding from the law – this was life in the valley. All of these tasks required strength, health, discipline, cunning, awareness, a great deal of knowledge and experience, and a fair dose of luck.
Pigs and goats provided meat and there were fish and shrimp in the streams. Open ditch stream diversions not only irrigated the crops but also provided a fertile silt load that constantly replenished the wealth of hidden gardens. Seabird guano, compost, and manure gathered in the goat caves provided fertilizer. Goat and pig guts and skins were buried in banana patches and around fruit trees, providing a rich, long-term nutrient source. There was an astonishing variety of fruits and vegetables, with taro and bananas producing the most bulk. There was the rare and legendary Kapua Ilohena Tahitian banana, many varieties of taro, watercress, basil, mamaki tea, kawa, and the most delicious fresh water in the Pacific. The valley was not a wilderness but an abandoned, overgrown, and partially-recovered Polynesian garden.
The beauty of life here was that, once one built a camp, a garden, an irrigation system, and developed an intimate knowledge of the surrounding micro-environments, life’s essentials could all be earned with a few hours of work per day. That left the rest of people's time for play: music, art, crafts, swimming, exploring and napping in breathtakingly beautiful surroundings.
While most of the individuals and couples in the valley could have been described as “loners” and didn't encourage visitors – including visits from their neighbors – they often gathered for feasts and parties at common ground “community kitchens” where, around the campfire, music, laughter, and conversation flourished.
Not your average hippies, these were tough folk – hunters, gatherers, farmers, survivalists who were living well thanks to in-depth and hard-earned knowledge of their environment. I think some of the residents fled to the valley because of their sense of the absurd coupled with a search for order without rules. There was no political correctness in their company and much well-intentioned humor. Joking around the campfire at night, I often experienced a playful, well-honed sense of the ridiculous, even to the point of mime and slapstick. Conversations were also practical, informative, and intellectually stimulating. Politics tended toward libertarian anarchy. The little religious philosophy I heard might be best described as a Buddhist/Animist/Pythagorean empiricism.
In the valley, self-sufficiency was sovereign. There were no identity politics. No “other” to blame if you showed up a day late to your banana patch and all your ripe fruit had been eaten by the birds and rats. If you broke a leg while hunting in a secret spot, it could be your death sentence. Many adventurous idealists have tried living in the valley – or just visiting – and those not prepared or acclimated to tropical parasites, microbes, and viruses came close to death from dysentery and staph-related septic shock.
Most people simply don’t have the necessary endurance, strength, or skills to get off the merry-go-round of modern life; the ground is too far down. (Not to mention, most people today couldn't handle withdrawal from social media.)
