The following is an excerpt from Russell Drumm’s book, A Rogue’s Yarn
HAU
The man walks toward me on Kalakaua Avenue, a tall man, and straight. His progress is halting. Three steps forward and stop, then another three and stop. His hair is past shoulder length, matted and gray like his beard. His clothes are threadbare, the color of soot, and look not to have left his body for weeks, perhaps months. He comes to rest, as he does each day, beside a big banyan, beneath one of the tree’s descending aerial prop roots with a look that sees nothing.
Around the man, Waikiki pours forth its salad of tourists, a Japanese bride and groom in matching white, their remora-like photographer recording every step of their passage from white stretch limo past 400-pound Samoans, Korean nannies, the statue of Duke draped in tired leis, past noodle shops, and tour-package come-ons, past the circle of non-alcoholics droning mea culpas, and past corn-fed tourists in matching Hawaiiana, their skin flamingo pink ready for basting. Filipino men wearing sandwich boards advertise the chance to fire Glocks, Berettas, Colts and all manner of assault rifles at a range upstairs just down the street. Tattooed, Spam-flabbed Hawaiian kids head for the Kuhio pier with paipo boards. A weary hooker shod in the high, clear-plastic heels that advertise her calling, clicks along home in the midday heat. The Pacific whispers its small swell to hush a Harley’s grumbling.
The tall man seems rooted, and it occurs to me that whatever his life had been, whatever forms his triumphs, loves, and final tragedy have taken, he is fast becoming more plant than human, and today, this does not seem such a bad thing. A couple days ago it might have, but not today, not since my visit to the Bishop Museum. Hitchhiked there on H-1 with a guy heading for Haleiwa with a new board.
It’s an overused word, epiphany. These days it describes the elation in recalling where you’ve put lost car keys. What I found within the black, lava-bricked Bishop among its trove of Polynesian treasures was more burning bush.
Scales fell from my eyes as I read the caption beneath a display of ancient fishing gear. The hook was bone. The line was made from the bast of hau, sea hibiscus, bast being the inner bark of the plant. The caption said the plant’s stems were allowed to soak for days until the connective tissue turned to pulp, which was then scraped off with a piece of mother of pearl shell called kahi. This freed the bast fibers. Hau cordage had many jobs that included the lashing of outriggers to canoes.
“She rubbed the fibers on her thighs with the palm of her hand and always with an outward motion,” the caption read, quoting someone named Keliikipi Kanakaole. She had told an interviewer in 1930 the way in which her grandmother twisted the fibers into cords.
Although warmed by the thought of womanly palms rubbing beautiful Hawaiian thighs stretching back into prehistory, it was the words, “always with an outward motion,” that provided further evidence in my investigation of unGoogleable truths.
Placing loose fibers in the palm of one’s hand and then twisting them together by rubbing the bundle outward on your thigh creates a right-handed, clockwise twist. It’s what spinners of any material call a Z twist. No matter where in the world rope has been made, and no matter what kind of fiber is used, the process begins almost always by twisting fibers “right-handed,” in a clockwise direction, “with the sun,” as the old sailor says, the way in which the sun appears to move across the sky.
I know this because me and rope have a history. It fascinates me: the genius of its invention, its muscle when working, the calligraphy of its coils, and especially, the reach of its vengeful memory.
I came to handle, appreciate, and fear rope as a deck hand on an offshore lobster boat that fished 60-pot trawls in one hundred fathoms of water. We used a modified timber hitch to dog down the pots when they were stacked on the backdeck to keep them from going over the side in heavy seas. Along the sides of the stack lay piles of carefully faked longline.
During one trip in late fall, a bite in the three-quarter-inch polypropylene line nearly closed on my boot as a trawl was being paid off the transom. It would have taken me down like it did the boot- bitten captain of our sister vessel. He was 30 feet down, at night, before he was able to cut the longline with his knife to free himself.
I’ve often thought the bite, that three-foot loop of black rope, would have been the end of me. Perhaps it was. In any case, I’ve never forgiven it. At the time, I wanted to cut it out of the longline to save it as a reminder, or to humiliate it by taking it apart, separating the strands from the lay, then untwisting the strands until the killer’s threads were exposed for what they were, a weak and useless pile of fiber.
On the other hand, laying it bare would have been like dissecting a dog for growling. Until it almost killed me, I hadn’t really seen rope for what it is. I worked with it, tied knots, spliced it, but never realized it was alive in the same way coal is alive, with the stored energy, the soul of stuff that was once living.
Somewhere along the line, toward the beginning, between opposable thumb and forefinger, palm and thigh, and because Darwin’s god told us, of all creatures, to find a way to pull yesterday into tomorrow, someone rolled together veins peeled from the stalk of a plant, rolled and twisted until the fibers became a thread.
