The National Park Service probably has the stats.  Maybe one of the eight National Parks in Alaska gets fewer visitors, but I doubt it.  For starters, who even knows there is a U.S. National Park in American Samoa?  Most Americans could not even find Samoa on a globe.  One unit of the National Park of American Samoa is on the tiny, remote outer island of Ofu in the Manu’a group.  Ofu is a “high” island, the peaked and jungled tip of an ancient volcano, of less than three square miles.  There are fewer than 200 residents.  Most of the island’s south shore and its associated coral reefs in To’aga lagoon are part of the park.  It is the closest thing to paradise I have ever found.

There are two Twin Otter flights a week from Pago Pago International Airport into Ofu’s abbreviated airstrip—if the wind is right.  I was often stranded there by cancelled flights.  I didn’t mind.  I made being there part of my job, first as territorial folk arts coordinator, then for 13 years as State Historic Preservation Officer.  Archaeological evidence from To’aga dates human habitation there back more than 3000 years.  It is also, famously, one of the most haunted—aitua—sites in the archipelago.  No one any longer lives in To’aga.  It is totally deserted.  Locals do not pass by there after dark.

When I started writing my Samoa-based Jungle Beat Mystery series, I resisted mentioning Ofu.  I considered it a secret best kept.  But its material was just too rich. I placed the third book, The Dead Don’t Dance, there, figuring its isolation, inaccessibility, and total lack of tourist amenities would continue to protect it.  Maybe readers would deem it mythical. 

As in all the books in the series, The Dead Don’t Dance’s basic conflict is the interface between Samoan culture and invasive American assumptions. Our detective sergeant, Apelu Soifua, is a native Samoan who spent years on the San Francisco Police Department.  His family and his father’s chiefly title are from Ofu.  The bad guys are mainland developers with designs to transform To’aga into a resort destination.  To’aga, with the aid of Apelu, his son Sanele, and Nupo, a weird old man hermit, must fend them off.  The mystical gets involved, the deep history of the place.  Strange events start occurring.  There is a grisly murder in the jungle night, a mysterious plane crash.

“The next day, Apelu took Sanele out to To’aga, and they removed all the plastic survey markers and stakes from what Apelu believed to be the approach to their ancestral land. For the hell of it, they pulled up a bunch of the other ones too. Then Sanele had the bright idea of moving the stakes around, so they put them back in different locations. They had fun…. Apelu took one of the stakes with its plastic ribbon and stuck it into a crack in the reef a dozen yards off shore.”

In a way, I guess, because all the Jungle Beat Mystery books take place in a tropical vacation setting, the reader becomes a tourist there.  The whole series is newly available in paperback, Kindle, and audio books from Open Road Media.  Welcome to Samoa.

data voids are a known challenge for all search engines

It must be so. I read it in The Times. I’ve had days like that, days, say, when there are no birds or weeks that left nothing behind worth remembering. 

Data voids and search engines.  Composition cloze tests, staring off, waiting for the word you know exists that will turn the sentence outward, open it.  Search engine self definition.  Blood hound minded, all else unimportant, or just sick solipsistic obsession? 

The bareness of a frozen overcast winter afternoon.

Once Upon a Crime

Heroes who could name a dame’s perfume at first sniff

Gun molls whose stocking seams were always straight.

Cops were called flatfoots and all detectives were dicks.

Phones were in phonebooths or attached to a wall.

Have you ever owned a car with running boards?

*

Just once I would like to light up in a saloon again

with my own ashtray beside a tall Cuba Libre

in a joint with no TV on the wall behind the bar,

back when the homeless were called hobos and

kids roamed the streets till the streetlights came on.

*

Black and white memories—the past as textbook.

White and Black, like the keys on my old Royal

Upright that I could make sound like gun shots

on the page, if I hit the keys hard enough.

Distances.  I wonder sometimes about people who live their whole lives in the county where they were born, folks from around here, for instance, for whom their farthest destination was a road trip to the closest gulf coast beach town.  All the numbers on their speed dials share their area code.     How many of my places am I far away from?  How many home ZIP codes have I forgotten?  A half dozen states and out of the country a third of my life. So many people left behind.  I wonder about them, too, sometimes, try to imagine them appropriately aged.  Lovers especially.  There are telescopes now that can see the beginning of time, distances measured in compounded eons, taking fantastic celestial photos of what once was as seen through the clarity of the empty space around us.  And the music of the spheres?  Tinnitus—the sound of living alone. 

                                                       

I caught myself doing it again—

peeling off labels—not a habit

more an unconscious prayer.

*

Her name was Melody and she

was weird. If I touched her left

cheek she had to touch her right.

*

Don’t tell me what is inside.

I ought to be pleased to recall;

ingredients in unreadable print.

*

Every memory has a place attached

but rarely a reliable date, a time of

day perhaps, dusk on Melody’s porch.

I’m not much of a calendar fan anymore,
just something else with numbers
that you are expected to submit to.
I once saw a clock that was just colors
like an old-time stoner’s lava lamp—
two columns, one for hours of the day
the other for the progress of each hour.
Time evolved through their spectra
changing —pink past purple, dinner time.
I guarantee if you try to measure memory
by moons you will lose count on some
fine night when numbers cease to matter.

          

I don’t know if Wendell would have wanted it that way or not. That’s what you say about things that happen after somebody dies–He would have wanted it that way. But Wendell never seemed to know what he wanted when he was alive, so it’s hard to say what he would want dead.

            I guess he wanted to be dead, because that’s how it happened. He did it himself with a .22 after years of trying with Royal Gate vodka.

            I had met Wendell in Vacaville just as I was finishing a deuce and a half for assault. Later when he got out he looked me up in Grants Pass and hung around for the better part of the next four years. We worked off and on as industrial painters, doing those jobs that other people wouldn’t do–like scraping and spray-coating the insides of silos and storage tanks. Shit work, no worse doing it hungover. On a regular basis Wendell would disappear on an extended drunk, come back broke and looking bad from as far away as Portland or Sacramento. Anyway, there ain’t much to say about Wendell’s life. I never heard him tell an interesting story. I don’t suppose he remembered much. He was maybe 32 or 33 when he pulled the trigger.

            His mother and sister came down from Butte for the funeral. They just signed the papers and had him cremated. There wasn’t a service per se, though one night at the local gin mill we had sort of a wake for him, with the regulars trying to think up nice things to say about Wendell. Well, he was quiet and never caused much trouble, and, amazingly enough, no one there could remember that Wendell owed them anything.

            It was back of my place where Wendell done himself. He had a room back there. The night of the wake at the bar his sister, who was getting fairly sloshed herself, gave me the urn thing with the ashes and told me that as Wendell’s best friend (news to me) I should decide what to do with him.

            The next afternoon when I stopped at the bar for a drink the bartender pulled the urn out from underneath the bar and said he believed I had forgotten this the night before. Which I had. I had never been responsible for taking Wendell home before. Besides, where was a better final resting place than at the side table near the ladies room door?

            Well, sitting there at the bar with Wendell just beyond the ashtray, I started asking people what they thought I should do with him. Someone remembered there was a spot up on the coast Wendell used to go to. Kicking Horse Bay. Sometimes when he’d reappear he’d say that’s where he’d been, up fishing at Kicking Horse Bay. It wasn’t over a hundred miles away, an out of the way place,  and the  shore  fishing  could be good there when conditions were right. Though I never knew Wendell to have any fishing gear.

            I was between silos, as it were, drinking up my paycheck while the fumes cleared out of my head. Drinking tequila. Wendell’s sister was there; she hadn’t left town yet. So she and I were drinking tequila and beers with Wendell pushed back on the bar between us. I’m trying to give him back to her–family and all, what’s right–when she suggests we just take him up to Kicking Horse Bay and feed him to his fishes. Well, cast his ashes into the waves of the only place anyone could remember Wendell ever saying he liked. She’d drive. So we agreed to that and had a toast on it, and the bartender set up drinks all around, including one for Wendell. a double shot of Royal Gate. And his sister reached over, unscrewed the top of the urn-thing and tossed it in to him.

            It was still pretty early, around dusk, so we decided to just do it, and we set out–Wendell’s sister, myself and a guy named Rob who just wanted to go for the ride. We stopped at a liquor store and stocked up with tequila, beer and Royal Gate, and Wendell’s sister drove. It took longer than it should have, as we stopped often along the way to take a slash and replace it at various roadhouses. Wendell’s sister kept tossing toasts into his urn.

            It’s a tough rut of a road on the way down to Kicking Horse Bay once the blacktop ends. I made Wendells’s sister stop finally about a quarter of a mile above the beach (women never listen to reason) and we stumbled and cussed each other the rest of the way–me with the flashlight, she with the urn, and Rob carrying the bottles.

            It was nice down on the beach. There was a little moon out in the clouds, the sea picking it up and making it brighter. Wendell’s sister and I were through cussing one another. Rob turned out to have hidden talents and pulled a harmonica out of a pocket and played appropriate tunes. We toasted Wendell, his sister occasionally remembering to give him his.

            After a while we’d finished everything we’d brought to drink and it was time to say goodbye to Wendell and haul our asses back up to the car. I sat there trying to think up the absolutely right last sentence to say, then went to pick up Wendell, who was heavier now and sloshed when I moved him. Rob was clinking through the pile of empties looking for one last drink–it would be a long dry haul home at this time of night. I was standing with Wendell in my arms about to deliver my eight word obit when Wendell’s sister yanked at my coat tail and I sat back down on the beach with an umph and a slosh from Wendell.

            She proposed one last drink to old asshole Wendell. I pointed out we were all out. Well, she said, I’ll finally have one on him. And she took Wendell from where he was sitting between my legs, unscrewed him, and dipped her empty plastic cup in there. The big chunks is bones, she informed us.

            In the morning, when she and I awoke on the beach tucked together spoonstyle against the cold, Rob was nowhere to be seen and Wendell’s urn was bone dry.

Torch an almost empty five gallon

Wesson Oil can with what is still

inside it (and maybe a little gasoline)

then knock the ashes off of it

so that when you lay into it

its sound is just the highest pitched

can in the band, carrying its soprano beat

across the sand and through bikinis

when you play on the sunset beach

Waimea girls dancing topless

in the tail lights of your dreams.

That drum won’t last a week

but it sure was sweet.