I visited Hawaii eight times before deciding to move here. I visited four times with my first wife, three times with my second wife, and once with my third wife; eight times to Oahu, three times to Maui, once to Kauai, and twice to the Big Island, where I decided to make my home 18 years ago. Life here has been always interesting, sometimes challenging, occasionally sad, and for the most part fun.
Arriving with minimal clothing (it was Hawaii after all), no furniture, nor anyplace to put any, and little cash, we booked an “affordable, private, rustic, time-honored” hotel for our first few days in paradise. We knew the Kona Surf was on Alii Drive; we didn’t know where. We crept along the Drive for hours discovering that every other hotel and condo was named Kona this or Kona that or Kona Alii something or Kona Kai something else. We were sure we had finally arrived when we came to the Kona Surf and Racquet; we hadn’t. Of course the Kona Surf was the very last hotel on the strip. Affordable, it turned out, meant not very. Rustic, it turned out, meant, literally, lots of rust. Private, it turned out, meant not near anything, and time-honored, it turned out, meant old and weathered and weary: not just the hotel, but also the staff.
Fortunately, about a week and a few pizzas later (the pizza guy, coincidentally, became an employee years later, but that’s another story), we found a house to rent. The gated community was impressive, the lot was pretty, if a bit neglected, the view was magnificent. The house was a disaster. It had been vacant, but not unoccupied, for several months after being vacated by a family who were, shall we say, not very tidy. The new occupants included a mongoose, one or two feral cats, one or two dozen geckos, a few transient turkeys, and a plethora of assorted and various insects and spiders. We were convinced the network of spider webs was designed to trap large rodents and small children. The spiders (harmless cane spiders, we later learned) looked big enough to devour toddlers, if not all at once, then leisurely, perhaps with some fava beans and a nice bottle of chianti.
We nearly didn’t rent the “spider house.” At first, deciding that the house was just too trashed and too expensive, we told the owners, a lovely couple who lived in Florida and had built the house to live in, but never did, that we needed to keep looking. A few hours of looking at houses that were even more expensive and rather trashy, if not trashed, convinced us of the potential of “casa de la spider.” Unfortunately, by the time we got back to them, the owners had agreed to rent the house to a family that had been living on the beach (a family, coincidentally, that we met years later and found to be very weird, but that’s another story). It took nearly an hour of compelling reasoning and brilliant negotiation to convince them that we would be better tenants. Or it may have been my promise to fix up the house for free and my agreement to forward a deposit and first month’s rent by electronic transfer that turned the trick.
Having successfully obtained our new home in paradise, we moved into “Hale Spider” the very next day. The first order of business being a careful analysis of the work to be done, I soon realized that the majority was cleaning and painting. Most of the basic systems and appliances were, if not new or clean, at least in working order. Some hardware needed replacing and some trim, having been omitted from the initial construction, needed placing (I suspect that when the intended owners left for Florida, the punch list got real short). I did discover, however, that the heating system in the house was not of any type with which I was familiar. Recently retired from several years of being an architect and builder in Vermont, I found it odd that none of the conventional systems that I had utilized for years were being utilized here. After an extensive search of the house and property, I finally concluded that the heating had to be a radiant system, with electric coils buried in the concrete slab. It was the only thing that made sense. It still bothered me, however, that I couldn’t locate the thermostat.
12/06/10
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