Musings: One Year Down

Something set the roosters off about midnight and they never really quieted down after that, and then rats started running around on the roof, apparently using it as an expressway to the fruit-laden strawberry guava tree outside my bedroom window.

So I was a bit bleary, although Koko was perky as ever, when we went walking on this morning with a definite nip in the air. Black-bottomed clouds hung low over Makeleha, but Waialeale — a demure lavender-pink today — was clear, and the entire pastoral landscape was illuminated by that deep golden light characteristic of September, my favorite month of the year.

Ran into both Andy and farmer Jerry along the road, where Andy jogged Jerry’s memory about the earliest inhabitants of the Dragon Building and the conversation morphed into old time union organizers and the Wailua range wars and cattle poisonings of bygone days.

It seemed appropriate to touch on the past, as I’ve been thinking of how today marks the one-year anniversary of this blog. I started it as a sort of cyber clips file and a place to share writings that I hadn’t published elsewhere, as is reflected in the very first post.

Then my mind got to musing, as it is wont to do, and later that day, after listening to a radio program that addressed Gov. Lingle’s pending trip to Kauai to talk about the Superferry, I added a second post, in which I posed the rhetorical question: “Is Lingle the devil, the personification of evil?”

Before I knew it, my blog was being circulated around the state Capitol and Hawaii Superferry officials were complaining to my editors at The Honolulu Advertiser, even dredging up freelance stories I’d written for Sierra magazine years before in an apparent attempt to prove I had too much of an environmental bent to cover the Superferry story.

HSF won that power struggle and I ended up getting pulled off the Superferry story. Contrary to some rumors, I wasn’t fired and the Advertiser said I could continue to write other stories for them, which I declined to do because the pay was too low.

But I went ahead and covered Lingle’s infamous meeting, anyway, and wrote about it without any of the restrictions I would have faced as a mainstream media reporter, including references to Jupiter and Venus.

And Kauai Eclectic was off and running. Btw, Katy Rose reports today that the union guys at the Mobile, Ala. shipyard where Superferry 2 is being built told her it’s due to be launched on Sept. 29 and will start heading our way — pending any unforeseen delays, of course.

While it was initially quite a blow to be pulled off the Superferry story, it turned out, as things often do, to be a blessing in disguise. It’s allowed me to more fully discover and develop my own authentic voice, and that’s a tremendous gift.

It’s also been a real lesson for me in learning to let go of my ego and defensiveness, and the comments have been a total eye-opener into a way of thinking that's very different than mine.

Sometimes it’s been a drag, but mostly it’s been fun, which is why I’ve continued, even though it’s still getting me in trouble. I got several emails and a phone call advising me that there is a warrant out for my arrest stemming from the Naue protest I covered. Attorney Dan Hempey is checking that out for me, so I’ll keep you posted.

In the meantime, I just want to say thanks to everyone for reading and commenting and being a part of Kauai Eclectic.