Pineapple, Expressed

A few minutes into my recent tour of Maui Gold’s pineapple farm, our guide announced over the intercom that “pineapple” in Hawaiian means “welcome”, which was met with a round of half-explainable applause from our busload of visiting fruit enthusiasts. I figured maybe everyone likes to hear an invitation to belong for awhile in a new place, and wondered if maybe we ought to clap for more of our lives’ beautiful minutiae when we can given the state of the world these days. But on the other hand, it felt unlikely to me that the translation there could be remotely real. Pineapple isn’t even native to the Hawaiian islands and has always seemed to exist as a symbol of the thorough supplantation of Hawaiian culture by external economic interest. What better representation could there be for the end of the native way of life in the islands than a logo of the fruit which has agriculturally dominated the literal and figurative landscape there for the last century and a half. Maybe a cartoon of a little crowd of cattle, or the now-infamous goats once gifted to a local chief which went on to spark the end of the region’s abundance of unhoofed soil. It felt impossible to me that even in translation either the word or the thing itself could somehow have come to imply “oh boy more foreigners”, but I decided not to raise my hand and look like a dick in front of my girlfriend’s dad.

If the drive to the company’s grow fields had been a sonogram, the doctor would have looked up from the screen smiling to report the place alive and kicking. It would be a stretch to say the unpaved trip was chiropractic, but it did serve as an adjustment from the cushy undertones of my last few days lounging in the sun by the pool and reminded me of riding in my grandfather’s pickup around his upstate New York pasture. It’s easy to forget that there is a harsh and hand-troweled reality just behind the painted veil of our local supermarkets and kitchen cupboards, and a deep place in me squealed as the mechanical feast of modern farming came further into view. Some of the contraptions wandering about with the various teams of field laborers felt like a modern equivalent of suddenly seeing a Brontosaurus through the trees, and the sheer magnitude of some of the agricultural machinery was equal parts inspiring and sobering. Hippy social media makes it easy to believe that there is a homesteader living secretly in each of us, but the brutal realism of what it takes just to raise a secondary fruit at any sort of scale left me feeling like much of modern humanity would be fucked if geo-political push came to apocalyptic shove, myself included. Scanning the belly of the bus, I gave all of us two weeks tops if we had to hack it off the grid and felt sure in such an event that none of us would touch an uncanned tropical thing ever again.

The tour was what you would expect, and towards the end of it we paused in one of the fields for samples. While our guide carved pineapples with a machete like he was in the circus, he told us about a recent tourist who accidentally grabbed the blade barehanded while trying to save their pineapple piece from falling into the dirt. As is often the case, it was a funny story if you didn’t think too much about the gore and I’m sad to say I stopped myself from quipping that it sounded like the pineapple hadn’t been all that happy to see them after all. The truth of it though is that I felt a great deal of kinship with the nameless machete-snatching goober who had hospitalized themselves over a fruit that looks like Adam Duritz. Despite the benefits of several years of therapy or a decade spent on porches digesting the passage of time with my friends, I can’t remember the last time I felt safe inside the confines of my own excitement and it was incredibly easy for me to imagine myself doing the same thing. Maybe I could comfort myself with knowing that part of being who you are comes with the risk of causing yourself or others harm, but on the drive back to the waxing and packing plant I found myself reflecting on how many times my instincts to chase something I want or protect something I love have led me to latch the soft flesh of my life onto the sharp edge of the world and pull. And as we arrived back at the parking lot and found our way to our rental car, I started to feel that if pineapple had actually come to mean “welcome”, it must be inviting us into a handful of layers of the same uncomfortable truth: That joy is just a difficult product of our life’s harsh agrarian architecture, and that its most viable climate lies inside the equatorial heat of our own individual suffering. It certainly seems to be the case, at least, that the parts of our lives and our selves we most wish had been different provide the majority of the soil for who we cultivate ourselves to be. And if I’m sure of anything at this point, it’s that what we are able to create is connected directly to what we are able to endure.