As promised

 Drew and Claire in the truck

Sunset from the farm

Our house, in the middle of the...mud

Where I have lived for the past week and where I will stay for the next month is something like the imagined college dorm. Except with no rules what so ever, no supervision, no maintenance, no cafeteria and a lot more geckos, spiders and cats. So really it's more like a frat, except it's co-ed, in the jungle and there's no free booze. So really it's just like a WWOOFing house. It's awesome.

There are nine of us living in the house together, and two other guys who live in a cabin on a secluded part of the farm which is commonly referred to as "six acres". Claire and I room with a guy named Drew in the largest of the four bedrooms in the house, which is sorta an unfinished garage space that houses a lot of nature (we're low in the pecking order in terms of room choice). Drew is a recent high school graduate from Michigan, who is into febreeze, weed and says the word 'bag' as 'beeeg'. His side of the room is separated from ours by a curtain with an autumn motif and the obvious mess and stench that accompanies boys. The next bedroom belongs to Chris and Everett. Chris is the senior WWOOFer, he's 21, from Texas. He has a wildly untrimmed ginger beard, is vegetarian, smokes hand rolled cigarettes in the rocking chair, and can tell you crazy stories about some the past WWOOFers who have come through. One the criteria of rooming with him is being bearded, so Everett naturally sports a scraggly black beard on his thin face. Everett is from Salt Lake City, is tall and thin, enjoys video and computer games, feeds the chickens, makes good grilled cheese and very quietly approachable. The room on the other side of the bathroom from Chris and Everett is where Whitney and Alicia live. Whitney is a recent high school graduate from Missouri, is the fourth oldest out of nine kids, and is truly fearless, just like the tattoo on her ribcage suggests. We always get picked up hitchhiking with her because she wears less clothes than the average person, is extremely bubbly and friendly and has an open face. Whitney rooms with Alicia from Colorado, who is the first person in her family to graduate from college and the only person in the current farmily to sport a degree. Her nickname is 'shit tits', she has a monarch butterfly tattoo on her arm, a great laugh and always threatens to cut off her bun when she's drunk. In the final room we have Chancey and Alexa. The former is 21, the latter 20, both from Portland, Oregon and came to the farm together. Alexa is everything you can imagine when someone says "surfer babe". She makes friends faster than anyone I've ever met, is nearly as OCD as me, only eats granola and peanut butter, and is leaving the farm soon because she got a job working on a boat and is moving in with a man named Ron. I can't tell you much about Chancey, because the day after we got to the farm she caught a flight out to Portland for about a week. She's coming back to the farm soon, she said she "just needed to sort some things out at home". I do know her mom is a flight attendant for Alaska Airlines, her older brother lives in Hawaii, she was planning to stay a year, and that she doesn't know that Alexa is moving out yet. Jared and Lee live out on six acres in the cabin. They used to be in the Navy together and recently reconnected on the farm. Jared lived in Vegas for 16 years, has a bunch of shoulder length little braids as hair, and is the most annoying ever. Lee is a super mellow surfer, who finds pleasure in the simple things, doesn't really eat and recently asked me if I could cut his hair into a mushroom shape because he's going to be a mushroom salesman.

The house is a big two story number, though the WWOOFers only live on the bottom floor. No one lives upstairs currently. There is a girls bathroom and a guys bathroom, and you get three guesses on which one is disgusting. It's very hard to keep the house at least decently clean because we track a lot of mud in, people 'forget' to do their dishes and we're a bunch of young people living together with no one telling us to clean up. It rains everyday, sometimes twice a day. This means that there is always mud, but also that everything is green. Everyone who works in the fields gets super muddy and that's why our house is always muddy. I have been working upstairs for the past week. The owner of the farm, a fast talking chinese woman who used to be a mechanical engineer at the top of her field, decided that, because I am Asian and tidy with my own things, I would be the person to clean out 17 years of fifth, bugs and mold from the upstairs part of the house. She and her family recently moved out, the manager and her daughter are moving in, and in the meantime the bride and groom of a nearby wedding want to stay there. The house was actually the most disgusting, and the couple was described to me as "immaculate", so naturally I have had a lot of work to do. Cockroaches have never been so big....

The next month will be, for one reason or another, one to remember. I don't mind being the resident maid that much, I just hope to have some close encounters with lettuce soon. As someone who historically adapts poorly, I think I'm doing pretty frickin well thus far. Hopefully it stays that way. I'm going to go clean gecko poop off my towel now.

I'm sorry, I'll start using my actual camera

The Aloha Spirit

            If you’ve ever been to Hawaii you’ll understand the concept of the “aloha spirit”.  The aloha spirit is the idea that you can stand on the side of the road with one thumb out and not actually know where you are hitch hiking to. It’s the fact that riding in the back of pick up trucks is completely legal in Hawaii. It’s the casual manner in which a WWOOFer leaves the farm with a one-way ticket to Kauai bringing only a camel-back sized bag, a one person tent and surf board with him. After spending four months on the farm, with less than $35 dollars to his name, and answering the question ‘what’s your plan?’ with ‘to surf!’. The aloha spirit means that things will happen in their own time, with their own direction and meaning. The aloha spirit means a panic attack for people like me.

            For one reason or another, parenting or culture or community or peers, I have grown up to be a rather anxious individual, despite my efforts to be otherwise. I’d like say to that adjectives to describe me include ‘flexible’, ‘adaptable’ and ‘easy-going’ but that would be far from the truth. I like plans, and organization and to have confidence in what I’m doing and where I’m going. I abhor mess and chaos. And I wish it was different. This gap year has been a plan for a long time, but the closer it got the more I realized that the reasons I was so determined to do it had changed. I wanted to see things I had never seen and contribute in different parts of the world, but if I’m honest, more than anything, I wanted to challenge myself. I wanted to challenge myself to delve into unorganized and chaotic territory, to go out and have no plan, and have plans fail and to have to adapt and teach myself that happiness and comfort are relative and are completely reliant on perspective. That I didn’t have to have to have the plan play out, that I could simply be and be happy. And jumping jelly fish, it’s easier said than done.

            Nothing has gone according to plan, and nothing has mirrored my expectations since we stepped foot off the plane. And in the past I would have said that if it didn’t follow the plan, it wasn’t necessarily a success. But that just can’t be true. Claire and I have been thrown about a bit, and we’re completely off course. But it’s all a little wonderful. The lettuce farm is starting to feel just right. I couldn’t have imagined or predicted this place; it just exists as its self, a mystery to those who haven’t experienced it. The ‘farmily’ as it’s called is becoming our community. We’re all very different, but we’re all here. I’m learning to appreciate people for all varieties of reasons, not just the basics. No one cares what level of education you’ve achieved, what you own, or what your weaknesses are. You do what you can with your strengths to contribute to the community and then what you can’t do is irrelevant.

            So we’re warming up. We’ll be at the lettuce farm for a month, and I have no doubts that it will be a month well spent. And I’m learning. Learning to sit on the beach for four hours and just be content. To hop in the back of the pick up truck without knowing where we’re going. To leave the house without a backpack. To leave behind my phone. To do only my own dishes and not the whole pile. To not need a reason to get up in the morning. To go to bed without laying out clothes for the next day. To have very, very dirty feet. To be somewhere extraordinary and not worrying about where I’ll be next. To exist for the sake of existing. 

A few quality iphone images from the Dragon fruit farm

Pack up, roll on

After three days Claire and I concluded that we couldn’t do it for three weeks.

The creepy manager who repeated the eerie slogan, “what happens on the farm stays on the farm”, the heat, the disgusting over all conditions and the tent, were all enough to convince us that we’d be tried it, and that we’d like to go to the original farm we had planned to work on before the owner had requested our help on the Dragon Fruit farm. We sent her an email asking to move sooner rather than later and citing our reasons, and we expected we would have about a week to tough it out on the farm and see the surrounding area. The very next day when Claire and I had biked into town, we set up in Starbucks and saw we had an email from her. She said to pack up our stuff, she was coming for us that day and we’d be gone by 5:30. It was all very fast and shocking, we got a ride back to the farm in the back of her truck, wedged in with our bikes, and just proceeded to pack up everything we owned and had just unpacked a few days before. I think I would have liked to stay on the farm a few more days just so we could explore Lahaina further in our time off and spend time at the beach, but she said we were moving and that was ultimately what we wanted.

So now we’re up in Haiku, where the other of the two farms is, the lettuce farm. It’s indoor housing here, and big, shared house with all the WOOFers. In the car she described it as a co-ed frat house. That was pretty accurate. The house itself is a mess, dirty and unorganized. But it’s not a tent, so I’m alright. There are nine of us total now, six girls and three guys. The owner (might as well give you her name: Crystal Schmidt) said we’d get a room to share if the other people had moved around like she wanted. They didn’t. We spent out first night (last night) in a large room with two other guys. Crystal didn’t have sheets for us so we slept in our bags on probably some of the dirtiest mattresses ever. We’re kind of the new kids on campus, there is definitely a seniority thing in terms of rooms and living space. I’m not sure if we’ll get our own space or not, we didn’t unpack yesterday because the room we’re sleeping in is full of old mattresses and boxes and there’s no space.

Our real hope for our WWOOfing experience was that we would become part of a community, people who live, eat and work together in a beautiful place. I think that is more possible here, the other workers are closer to us in age, and we’re sharing a house. But to be honest, day one was kind of awkward. No one seemed that juice that we had showed up, they were all a little aloof and indifferent. I think we’re kind of just more people who they have to make space for in a community that has already been established.

Hopefully this one will work out better than the last. Claire and I had a very set plan before we arrived, but we’re realizing now that we just need to do what works for us and makes these three months in Hawaii worthwhile. Even if this farm turns out to be a good thing, we’ve decided we won’t stay more than a month. Thanks to all our amazing friends and family, we’ve collected a good number of contacts and safeties here in Hawaii. All the people I talked to before this trip said WWOOFing can go very well or very poorly. We’ve seen that. So though our original plan was to farm for three months, we’re now expanding our options to include anything and everything. If we can last the month here (and hopefully enjoy it!) we’d like to move on to a new farm perhaps or even a new thing entirely. Maybe work and rent a room, maybe even go to a new island. We’re on a tight budget and will be doing a lot of hitchhiking, but we’re determined to keep moving and make the best of the time we have. It’s incredibly scary to realize you’re completely on your own, and where you go, how you get there and how you handle it is all on you. But it’s also exciting, a lot of work, but exciting non-the-less. Fingers crossed we end up in good places with good people.  

Oh the chaos

Loooooordy. Where to even start. It went like this:

Claire and I landed in Maui, and were received by a very eccentric woman named Dr. Dawn Boucher. I couldn’t imagine what she could possibly be a doctor of, but apparently it’s chemistry. You wouldn’t have guessed by looking at her. Dr. Dawn Boucher explained that she was a good friend of the owner and partial manager of the farms. She drove us in her flat bed truck to the long awaited Maui Dragon Fruit Farm. Turns out we could’ve waited longer. The place was a complete mess. The descriptions the owner had given us on the phone, and via email were a far cry from the actual situation. We had been told to bring a tent and that we would set up in the secluded workers camp. The camp was a ravine dug into the hillside, with trash and rusted farm gear strewn everywhere. The ‘raised wooden platform’ that was provided to put the tent on was a pile of broken and jagged ply wood, not big enough for our tent. The outdoor shower was open backed and caked in dirt and trash, with the open side facing another man’s tent. The community kitchen was a three-sided shack with mold everywhere, dust coating the shelved food, trash lining the outside and an army of chilled flies buzzing casually around the inside of the fridge. Open a bag of lunchmeat, and you can guarantee that there was a little critter in it. In her emails, the owner had said that there was a community living room with couches and a computer. It was actually a tin roofed shack with some broken wicker furniture and enough dirt to plant some dragon fruit. And the cats. The woman who picked us up from the airport said she had made a mistake by bringing cats to the farm. Didn’t really know what she meant till I got there. She brought a few unfixed cats, and consequently there were now around 15 cats, running loose all over the farm. Our first night in, I woke up in the middle of the night to a ripping noise and realized a cat was clawing its way up the side of our tent to sleep on top.

The next illustration is regarding the people on the farm. As we were driving Dawn explained to us that we were the only women and by far the youngest people on the farm. The manager was a 45 year old man named J.D. who Dawn said “was an alcoholic but a good worker”. A few days later when all the workers would go down to the beach together, he would get so wasted off of boxed wine that we’d have to go find him in the sand to bring him back to the farm and he would proceed to collapse on Claire in the process of getting into the car. Then there was Brandon, who was “a nice kid, but I swear he’s on drugs”. The other two were relatively normal young guys, Aaron and Louis. So Claire and I came in, two 18-year-old girls fresh outta high school, and pitched our tent in the heap and feared the prospect of showering.

The next few days were more than challenging. Living in a tent is fun when you’re camping for a few days with family or friends, but daunting for the prospect of six weeks in 90 degree weather and intense humidity. Dragon fruits are cactus like plants that are arranged to grow up large concrete poles, work in the fields one day and your legs will look like you were in a cat fight. Claire and I got in the habit of showering together for safety and so one person could keep a look out. We struggled to stay hydrated and un sunburnt. Lahaina, the town we were close to, is on the dry side of the island and so rain is very scarce. Naturally, it rained the first three days. We had water pooling under our tent and some seeping through. The first night we arrived, we had showered after dark in the cold water and gotten into bed, clean and not get sticky from sweat in our tent. We were halfway through an embarrassing chick flick comfort movie when the three guys (excluding J.D. our drunken friend) stumbled up outside our tent and said “Laaaadies, are you reaaadayy?”

Claire and I didn’t respond, just looked at each other. They carried on, “new WWOOFers you know, its time. We pollinate with new WWOOFers”. At this point Claire came to life and asked them what on earth they were talking about. They told us to put on long pants and follow them into the field. Turns out with Dragon fruit, the flowers only open at night and so you have to go out every night at nine and walk through all the fields, shaking the shit out of the flowers so that they will pollinate. Who knew?

Pregame post

Location: Albany, California. The Morning Room.
Next destination: Lahaina, HI on Wednesday, September 19th.


Saying goodbye is a very strange thing. Some people hate it, and long goodbyes are just the severest form of torture. I've yet to really form an opinion on the matter because I honestly haven't ever said any real goodbyes. Like the kind where you'll never see them again, or it'll be years, or it'll at least be too long. When I leave or they leave, it's more like a "nice seeing you, see you again soon", though that in no way means it's any less dramatic. I love dramatic. I like dragging out the goodbyes, and leaving gifts or messages, or bringing up old beef right before we part, or pretending that there is something incredibly important that needs to be sorted out before anything else happens as we work against the clock. I love it all, and it's a rather terrible habit.
My fascination with the eventful and impermanent goodbye is being put to the test by my current situation. For the first time ever I'm at a point where goodbye will actually mean goodbye. Not because I'm dying or they are dying or we're forbidden to ever meet again, but simply because it will never be the same. I guess that fact has been true before for other people, but this time it's true for me. I have no idea who I will be after each leg of my adventure and the people I know and love won't be standing still either. So all that's left to do really, is to be grateful for the time that has been spent, the people who you've connected with, and the relationships and moments that were extraordinary and fleeting.
Thoughts on goodbye aside, the adventure looks like this. Tomorrow morning at 7:45 I board a flight to Maui with Claire Fahrner. She and I are going to live on Maui and participate in the WWOOFing (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) program there with a family run organic farm. WOOFing is a work exchange program, so if we can be productive on the farm for five hours a day, five days a week, they will feed and house us. Which is awesome if you are 18 and self-financing your entire gap year (hint: me). Claire is a champion because she agreed to spend three months with a crazy person on an Island digging in the dirt. She starts school at Mount Holyoke College in January, and until then is adventuring with me. I am super grateful for that, I was worried that the beginning part of my gap year would be lonely, but she's ensured it won't be!
The family we're working for has two farms, a dragon fruit farm on the dry side of the island and a lettuce farm on the wet side. By a stroke of incredible luck a good timing, Claire and I get to work six weeks on the dry side and then spend six weeks on the wet side, double the adventure eh?
After we've farmed and learned to be hardcore, we'll come home December 12th. From there I head on to England, India and perhaps a few place in between. But I'll get to that later. For now, the focus is Hawaii.
In all honesty, Claire and I have no idea what we're getting ourselves into. We don't know who the other WWOOFers will be, how hard the work is or what we're going to do with ourselves when we're not farming. In spite of our serious lack of information and no doubt relative incompetence for farm work, we've packed our bags and said our goodbyes. And, in my opinion, that's part of the gap year experience.
I've planned this gap year carefully, earned the money to fund it, bought my plane tickets and played pen pal with the connections I have to set it up. Those aspects of the trip I am sure about. However, there are so many things I cannot plan for and it just has to be that way. A lot of people ask my why I'm doing this, taking a whole year and deferring from school to go scrounging my way across the globe. The first and most honest answer is simply because I want to. I want my education to encompass not only what people and books can teach me, but also what I can go out and teach myself by being open to the idea that the space I inhabit is small and the world around me is big. And it all starts tomorrow morning.