The Apple of the Pine 

 

     On the day after Christmas fifty years ago, ten thousand rats and I fled with fur a-flying from our bedrooms in a sugarcane field on Maui because someone had set fire to the other end of the field. The rats probably had a better handle on what was going down. They were in a way hurry to get the puck out, and several of them ran right over my bedroll and woke me enough to recognize the crackling as a big fire noise. When my partner and I had abandoned hitchhiking the night before and spread our blankets in the cane, neither of us realized that the harvesting of sugar involved (at least in those days) torching off the whole works. Cane fields burn very quickly. To this day I cut rodents a little bit of slack even when they crap in the silverware drawer because those rats saved our buns that morning.

     Hitching in Hawaii was not easy or fun.  Eighty percent of the traffic through that part of paradise was rental cars filled with folks who plopped down several thousand for an airplane ticket and a week in a condo alongside the Pacific and were damn sure not going to stop and pick up a couple of hipnoid types standing in the sugar smoke with rat prints on their foreheads. The rest of the folks, the native Islanders, seemed a bit testy about Caucasians with alternative lifestyles back then, thirty years before Wal-Mart started selling tie-dyed Hawaiian shirts, and slowed their rides only long enough to flip a finger and a few racial epithets our way. So, when a 1940’s open Jeep rattled to a whoa and the skinny brown shirtless guy waved a c’mon to us, we sprang at the chance. Anywhere he was headed was going to be an improvement. 

     I rode shotgun. Wedged beside the gearshift was a machete in a green canvas case. I tried a couple of sentences of introductory thank-you chit-chat, but the driver just glanced my way and shook his head. Not the English as a second language type. By the time he had the old military rig up to full 45mph speed, it was so noisy and front-end wobbly that we couldn’t have discussed the perfect weather anyway, so my partner and I just hunkered and let things happen.

     Ten minutes into the voyage, I was almost asleep when the Jeep skipped from the blacktop onto a red dirt road that jumped up onto a tableland where we four-wheel drifted to a stop in what looked to be miniature Christmas tree farm. The guy reached down for the machete, looked me in the eye, pointed to his mouth and bailed out. Four strokes of the blade later, he walked back to holding a pineapple the size of a turkey and the color of a wedding band. He flipped down the tailgate, and with ten precise surgical maneuvers provided us with one of the most delicious, healthy, locally-harvested breakfasts I have ever eaten.

    Let us flip the calendar pages a few hundred times to a Friday afternoon and teleport from Cook’s Islands to an office party on the second floor overlooking Main Street, Walla Walla, Washington. I was feeling humbuggy, in part because I had been blindsided by the party. I only worked a couple of days per week for the symphony orchestra that occupied the offices and I missed the party memo. There were presents for me, but I had none for my comrades in the music wars. Couple that sensation with the fact that I had already forged formal agreements with both my wife and my mother that I have enough stuff and that I expected and wanted no stuff in celebration of the nativity. 

     Simultaneously, twenty miles away, Caty was experiencing economic gridlock in a monster box store while standing in front of a display of artificial Christmas trees. Either we had turned into tree huggers or Clifford’s ‘Whatever” approach to the holidays had deterred us from going up into the mountains and slaughtering a baby fir for his benefit. We own two cubic yards of ornaments that are still sitting in boxes above the hot water heater and some kind of tree, even a petrochemical totem, seemed obligatory.  Luckily she saw the “Made in China” label, resisted the marketing, and wandered back out of the catacombs of international commerce. 

    Just then, in the very depths of my yule-inspired moroseness, the Christmas spirit became wholly manifest when the symphony boss man presented me with the perfect gift, a whole fresh Dole Hawaiian pineapple in all its green and yellow glory. Not only did its fragrant presence jerk my memory back into Mauian Christmases of yore, but the little red tag hanging from its spikey green top inspired me with a solution to the tree dilemma 

     That year, on a blanket chest in our living room, minimally lighted, surrounded by presents and assorted Yuletide doodads stood in all its magnificence a fully decorated fresh Hawaiian pineapple. Later, on New Year’s Eve, we butchered and ate our Christmas plant. Try that with your seventy-five dollar Colorado Blue Spruce. 

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