Big Island police are puzzled by the nighttime hordes of teen-agers roaming the streets of Hilo and Kona. Police say the kids are drinking, fighting, causing mayhem on the highways and terrorizing decent citizens. Good times in
Big Island’s cane fieldsI don't know about Kona, but I have a pretty good idea what the problem is on the Hilo side: the shutdown of the sugar industry.
When I was a teen-ager in Hilo, if we wanted to gather en masse to drink, fight and socialize we did it in the cane fields that surrounded the city. Our parents wouldn't have liked what we were doing up there, but at least we kept our bedlam off the streets.
Since the plantations closed, the nicely cut clearings in the cane that served as teen gathering spots are overgrown with weeds.
I got more of an education in those sugar fields than I ever received at Hilo High. If nothing else, we were high-brow lowlifes. Our topic of conversation was as often politics, religion or philosophy as girls, sports and booze.
The cane fields were really my introduction to politics. John F. Kennedy had just been assassinated and Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater were battling for the presidency. We spent entire nights in the sugar fields debating of the merits of the two.
Many of my friends were the sons of sugar planters and other pillars of the business community. They liked Barry. Others like me were the sons of New Deal Democrats and LBJ looked good to us. (Hey, it was before anybody noticed Vietnam.)
It was in a cane field that my relationship to God became clear. I was looking at the stars and listening to my friends argue about religion when the revelation came. I didn't join the discussion to explain it then and won't do so now, but the understanding I reached that night has stuck with me to this day.
I learned to play the guitar in the cane fields. They hadn't invented portable boom boxes yet and we had to make our own music. I've never enjoyed better acoustics.
Many of us experienced our first awkward gropings with members of the opposite sex in the cane fields. We each had our secret make-out spots. After we took our dates home, we would meet to tell lies about our amorous adventures.
There were always fights going on. Two guys would call each other out at a football game and head for the sugar fields. Onlookers would form a circle of cars with headlights on and watch the principals duke it out.
I never saw anybody seriously hurt. Somebody would usually break it up as soon as one of the combatants established dominance. There was always the danger of getting sucker punched by some clown inspired by the action, but the resulting black eye made for a great story and only hurt a few days.
It would be disingenuous to skim over the fact that much Primo, Olympia and - if anybody had real money - Budweiser was consumed in the cane fields. But that wasn't the main point for me.
One of my great disappointments after graduation was that we were old enough to drink in bars and stopped going to the cane fields. How could a bar measure up to solving the world's problems in a sugar field on a starlit night? So I quit drinking and got serious about my life.
It was excellent timing. My turn to abstinence came just as marijuana, LSD and speed were becoming popular and got me through the turned-on '70s and self-indulgent '80s clean and sober. I only wish some of my friends had made the passage as safely.
