We were packed.
Husband Dear was driving a rented van, for the vehicles had already sailed away on a cargo ship bound for L.A.
I sat in the passenger seat with my little dog, Peaches, on my lap. In the back seat, Daughter Dear shared space with her year-old son, a laptop, a diaper bag, and a purse while trying to avoid being set upon by Bear, a 150-pound Newfoundland dog.
Behind her, the dog carrier with its top nested inside the bottom held cat carriers holding Hope and Zoom Zoom. We were aiming for the airport on the other side of the Island.
Moments ago, I said goodbye to the house, the yard, and the Tiki room across the expanse of green. I watched the green enlivened grass almost every morning as though the goddess was turning up her rheostat.
Alongside the road, deep canyons carry water out to sea. From the bridges over those ravines, we looked over that incredible green dotted with red flowers that sit atop 100-foot trees like parrots.
Fifty miles from home, a flagger stopped us. “A tanker rolled over,” he said. “It will take half a day to clean up the spill.” He waved us away with no suggestion of an alternative route.
We sat dumbfounded.
Our belongings were gone, the car and truck were gone, and that tip-over probably scared the bejeesus out of the driver.
Bear needed to be deposited with United Cargo by 9 a.m. as United Airlines demanded he go Cargo, and we had arranged connections in L.A.
We were in shock.
A roadblock.
A back seat scream: “Get Me off this Damn Island!”
Husband and I stared at each other as angry purple ooze spread through the vehicle. “Take Saddle Road!” We say in unison. So, we backtracked the 40-miles back toward Hilo to where Saddle Road exited the highway.
We drove the one-lane Saddle Road up and over the mountain, down the ravines, over single-lane bridges, and across the Texas look-alike countryside with more cars this morning than other times. We arrived at United Cargo before the nine o’clock deadline.
However, as Daughter Dear spoke with the forklift driver and with him shaking his head, I knew the results looked bad.
The dog kennel had been modified. The driver would not take it. Continental Airlines carried Bear from the mainland to Honolulu in it. Aloha Airlines Cargo carried him to the Big Island in it. No amount of my pleading would get that dog in that carrier on board that airship.
Okay, we raced over to Pet Co, where—miracle of miracles—they had the largest airline-approved kennel available. The last time we visited that store, they had none.
Daughter dear bought the new, expensive, airline-approved kennel. It would be a tight fit for Bear, but we figured he would have to manage.
We raced back to Cargo. We fit the top and bottom of the carrier together, tightened the wingnuts, and asked Bear to try it. “And, compliant dog that he was, he climbed in. You couldn’t ask for a better dog.
They told us they would not load him on the noon flight and that we had to go that night at eight o’clock.
We raced to the airport ticketing, where a man changed all our tickets to the 8 p.m. flight. Ah. We go back and rescue Bear from the confinement and the heat.
“Be back at 2 p.m.,” they told us.
Two o’clock for an eight o’clock flight?
Okay, we were back at 2 p.m. We deposited Bear at Cargo and went into town for a bite to eat with the other animals in tow. Along the way, we got a phone call.
Someone somewhere canceled our flight.
They scheduled us to leave the following morning at ten o’clock. I envisioned a hot night in the car, as the hotels on the Island are not pet-friendly. And there was Bear confined in a kennel that fit him like a wet suit.
We go back to the airport. Daughter reminded us that the Cargo hold closes at 3 p.m., which means Bear was locked in—oh, that was why he had to be deposited at two o’clock. We must wait until 6 p.m. as no person occupies the ticketing booth until then. We encountered other passengers in the open-air waiting area who received the same phone call we did. “What happened?” asks one. “The plane didn’t leave San Francisco,” says another.
Bottom line: no plane.
Nina and I shake our heads at the irony, how the Island called us, how it got us there, and how we thought it was pushing us off. But we were still on.
I would have laughed, except as I sat there on the bench at the airport, I felt like the little anole I accidentally painted into the porch steps. I didn’t mean to do it, dusk was settling in, and I didn’t see that a little lizard was in my paint path. Instead, I found his flat little body the following morning, a lizard relief in the gray-blue porch paint.
I felt like that little lizard—stuck.
So, we sat in a hot, humid airport waiting in Island time for a ticket booth to open. Six o’clock, they said. No one occupied the booth until six. Okay. We waited.
Daughter and her son entertained themselves with travel brochures—a fiery volcano, horseback rides, helicopter rides, zip lines, orchid farms. Husband Dear, read a book. Peaches stretched out on her stomach on the cool cement. The cats were quiet in their carriers. And Bear? You know where he was, in lock up.
My mind wandered back to the house we left behind only a few hours earlier. It is vacant, alone. But it isn’t alone. The neighbor’s horses will be right outside. They are using our property for pasture. The neighbors will mow the property in return for free pasture. Jeff, the carpenter we hired to bring the Tiki Room up to building permit standards, will live in it. He will watch out for the house and keep the property looking lived-in until it sells.
I called our neighbor and told her she could have our modified dog carrier if she would drive to the airport and get it.
I thought about my horses and how we wanted those ten acres for them but didn’t ship them. I thought about the sad day I gave them away and how my Daughter gave away her two horses.
“You can hold me,” I told the Universe, “you can rain on me, mosquitoes can chew on me, you can scare us with stories of long-ago injustices, but you can’t keep me here. You can give Husband heart trouble to make him leave—he was happy here, he would have stayed, but I am not having him die here. None of us are dying here. We want to live, and it will be beyond the horizon that we do it!”
What?
I felt a jiggle as my little grandson crawled up beside me on the bench. My telephone/clock whispered to me that it was 6 o’clock.
In-mass we go to the ticketing counter.
Whatever caused the log-jam of this day’s events was about to burst. I could feel it. It was not without fear, however, that we approached the desk.
Karen, the ticketing person, a take-command lady, changed our tickets to another plane scheduled to leave that evening at 8:55 p.m.
That night!
After a stop-over in San Francisco, we were scheduled to arrive in Los Angeles around nine in the morning. I was stunned. HAPPY DAY!
Lovely Karen called Cargo to have Bear shuttled over to our plane. She checked in all four animals, had them taken aboard, checked our carry ons—they didn’t charge us for that service—and bumped us up to first class. We were off—just like that. (And we got there earlier than we would have on our initial schedule.)
In First Class, there was food for the family and a glass of wine for me. I settled down with the prayer, “Get us to the mainland,” and lay my head against the seat’s headrest.
We taxied down the runway.
Wait?
What was that I heard?
It was Peaches, our poodle. I didn’t know the animals were right beneath us. She could hear us, and every passenger on the plane could hear her. And so embarrassed, not claiming we knew who belonged to that dog, we sailed out over the ocean to the tune of, “Yap, Yap, Yap, Yap, Yap, Yap, yap…
Pila of Hawaii says that visitors to the Big Island are on special ground, standing at the doorway “Where the Earth herself liquefies and nothing is quite as it seems. Many visitors,” says Pila, “draw upon this energy to help them find direction in their own lives.“
That was our reason for going.
Frog sings the songs that bring the rain and makes the road dirt more bearable.”—
The Medicine Cards by Jamie Sams and David Carson.
On Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=The+Frog%27s+song+by+Joyce+Davis&i=stripbooks&ref=nb_sb_noss
On Barns & Noble:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-frogs-song-joyce-davis/1129812209?ean=9781947548145