The Ballad of Bamboo Bobby

Perhaps this is another projection of synchronicity: I can’t seem to go anywhere on the island without meeting people that aren’t spookily connected to the place that I came from. For example, yesterday, I was walking down the street, and this tall man, with a high pitched voice, beady eyes under a baseball cap, and a white goatee, asked me where I was from and what I was doing on the island. I told him I was from Michigan. He said, “okay, where?”

“The lower peninsula.”

“Okay, where?”

“Metro Detroit.”

“Okay, where?”

“Lake Orion.”

His eyes got big. “Oh, Lake Orion? I almost drowned in Lake Orion.”

Situations like this seem to keep happening, no matter what part of the island I’m visiting. What’s weird about it, is that the locals never seem fazed by their surprising, unique connection to where I’m from. It’s like they’re so used to it happening with people that it’s no longer a big deal.

On Thursday of last week, I went to meet with a man aptly dubbed, “Bamboo Bobby.” When I gave him a call, he recognized my area code. He had grown up in and around Pontiac, a suburb of Detroit that’s adjacent to Lake Orion, my hometown. Bamboo Bobby worked as a car mechanic for most of his life, not surprising for someone from the “Motor City” (my dad is a car mechanic as well). Since coming to the Big Island, he’s been a bamboo builder, a biodynamic farmer, a Taekwondo instructor, a youth mentor, and many other things. This is how my day went with him:

I arrived a little after 10 o’clock, having left Kapa’au at 9. To get to his place, you drive down the Hamakua Coast highway, past Honoka’a, and then after mile marker 37, you take the first right and head up the mountain. His driveway is 1.7 miles up, on the left. I drove down his cement driveway, through a gulch, and parked in front of his barn, affixed with two large bamboo doors.

I walked up to his cabin, and found him rustling around in the back of his pickup truck, looking for something. He greeted me with a tight, friendly hug. “Check this out!” he practically screamed at me. “This is my obelisk.” He gestured at, well, his obelisk. It was about 4 feet tall, columnar, pyramidal, and adorned with various hieroglyphics and symbols. “It’s totally sick.” He said, calming down now, as if the presence of the obelisk was chilling him out. We talked for the next two hours, and he showed me around his property. The man was so full of passion; his skin was sparking with electricity. He had a couple of off grid cabins, an outdoor shower, a workshop, a ton of fruit trees, and a deck that he just finished for doing yoga on in the morning while the sun is coming up.

I’ve never met someone that exuded enthusiasm as much as Bamboo Bobby. He was definitely shaping his reality to be exactly what he wanted for himself. He had so much energy and passion, talked a million miles a minute, and I struggled to keep up. As we walked, he would get side tracked, picking up one thing, working on it for a minute, and then setting it down and going to something else. He told me about his car troubles in one breath, this book, “Way of the Peaceful Warrior” in the next, and then was listing the six types of simple machines in his third breath.

Bobby also understood the importance of community and paying it forward. He had recently befriended a woman named Jennifer Holani, and he was helping her to restore an old 11-acre farm that used to provide all of the food the schools in the town of Honoka’a but had been abandoned, and taken over by nature. They had a meeting with the principal of the school, and with the director of a non-profit that was going to be funding the development of a summer program at the farm. I tagged along, and then afterward I helped them draft a Request for Proposal.

Jennifer was one of the sweetest people I’ve met on the island so far. Gratitude was radiating out of her sunshine. My ankle had started to bleed--that’s a whole other story, involving a tent, a brown recluse, my own stubbornness, and an overnight stay in the hospital--and she immediately noticed and insisted on cleaning me up, and gave me a bunch of bandages and native Hawaiian medicine to put on it.

After we finished the proposal and submitted it, I got Jennifer’s contact info so that we could stay in touch, and Bobby and I went to dinner in Honoka’a. We were sitting at the bar, and soon joined by this old couple. The male half of the couple, Dale, was born and raised in Detroit, and lived there until he was in his late twenties. So there we were, three guys all born and raised within 20 miles of each other, sitting shoulder to shoulder in a restaurant in Honoka’a. Synchronicity.

#Bamboo #Honokaa #SustainableLiving #Travel #Community #Relationships #Hawaii