It is a warm day in January 2020, and we are standing on a steep slope, just inside the lower edge of a tropical rain forest in Manoa Valley, on the island of Oahu in Hawai’i.
The ground is slick under foot, and an ooze of red mud is rising around each of our boots as we move slowly into the thicket of bright green palms, every one boasting glossy folded fans, more than eight feet in diameter. They have strange shredded clumps and looping stands of brown fibrous hair, full of insects. Gently, we push our way deeper into a glade of orange flowering ginger plants and then through the wetly cupped beaks of red heliconias that spill nectar on our skin with a deep spicy scent. A hundred thousand droplets of sun sparkle brightly in the half-dark as downpour after downpour surges across this valley. January is the wet season and further up the mountain above us, 23 inches can land in only 24 hrs. It is important to keep moving, as depths of mud seem uncertain, and it would be all too easy to get a foot trapped in the awe of standing still.
Every few minutes the wind rises again, into a clatter of soft smashing through the canopy above and we brace ourselves into the nearest rock or tree root to be engulfed by a power-jet of rain.
I have been trying to draw. But ink washes off the paper in here, faster than I can put it down and I have been ploughing with my pen more often than working over the surface. On patches of harder ground I can lean forward to shelter my drawings beneath me. With my arms jutted out like a child’s mime of a chicken, I can stand in the vain hope of directing volumes of water running over my back, neck, shoulders and arms down into two organised streams leaving from my elbow tips. If I purse my lower lip upward I can blow a third stream off the end of my nose and blinking hard wring water out of my eyes, since I have no spare hand to wipe them.
Head down under this force, I can do no more than watch eddies curl and rush through the delicate patterns of ink on my paper, tension released from one line into another and then another as floods of paler tones pool into darker marks and then break forward, driven on and on across the paper, jolting this way and that, reconnecting delicate past moments of attention and focus, overwhelming and then obliterating them, until at length I decide to tilt the whole drawing down and release it to wash away into the leaves.
The storms are worse this year. The worst on record, so I cannot do most of the work that I have come here for, which was to draw indigenous plants. But I am drawing on regardless. Not plants as everyone will still expect of me, but the water, my prime experience of being in this place. Because drawing somehow opens my lungs and eyes and ears to a deeper experience of the colour, sound, light, temperature and scent that I am immersed in. Drawing, is, for me, a kind of touch and taste and breathing that generates a brighter, and more vivid memory of time and place.
Three of the university’s arborists are working close by, but just out of sight. Busy with routine maintenance, each man is hanging relaxed in a harness, doing light pruning work with a machete. And suspended beneath them all, on a lower rope, is a blue plastic box booming fabulous island reggae. This is helping us to navigate, making it easier to keep track of which way we are facing inside this thicket. Sadly, after only a few more days of trying to think and work my way through all of the rearrangements of the project, the risks of landslide and flash flooding become so great, that we all have to leave, and for now, find another place to work.
Given the as yet unmentioned matter of mosquitos, and our daily breakfast table competition to see who still has more knuckles than bites on each hand, this might be indoors.
On the dry white sandy beachfront in the middle of Waikiki, pressed between an edifice of concrete tower blocks, a fast main road rammed bumper to bumper with jeeps, the biggest and most popular surf club and tequila bar, the bike hire and catamaran ticket booths, and the districts favourite place for newlyweds to have their pictures taken, is the University Aquarium, a research centre for teaching families, especially small children, about the precious diversity of ocean life.
In a circular corridor of small booths, each painted black like a theatre, brightly lit tanks display the collection. Pink and yellow corals with giant clams. A 70 yr old grouper fish floating in the shadows with a much younger shark. Clouds of jellies and softly mating sea horses in a tall glass column and a monk seal gliding round and round his plain concrete wall. Static frog fish with front legs bridged between plastic sticks, playing games of freeze under boxes full of racing shoals. And on my side of the green greasy glass is the unrelenting clash of loud and looping commentary.
Near to the entrance, on the left, is a plain rectangular case, three sides exposed and one fitted tightly beneath the ceiling. A single pile of rocks in the middle is almost big enough for something to hide behind and the label tells us that this is the home of a small, male, six month old Day Octopus (so called because they hunt by day, or at least, dawn and dusk). He will stay here until he is sexually mature, then be released back into the ocean to mate, once, before he dies. For now, still too young, he must cope with this tank.
When I first found him I stood at the back corner, in the shadow of the wall. A feeble attempt to not be intrusive. He was sleeping in a quiet lull but with one eye slightly open, noticing my arrival. My paper was now taped to a dry drawing board, and taking a grey fibre-tip pen I began to watch him at rest. Trailing my lines slowly I looked for patterns and folds in his skin that I did not yet understand, and drew as a process of meditation, to become more present and focussed on this sensitive, intelligent and mysterious creature. It did not matter how the drawings looked or whether they were good or bad. I was just using a gentle movement of my hand and the undulation of pressure to find a way in.
Lulls never lasted. Children screamed into the place. Coach load after coach load arrived, all in rapid time slots. En masse they would rush through the darkness with clip boards and sandwich packs and breathless excitement, yelling “NEMO!!! NEMO!!! NEMO!!!!” at the sight of the first orange fish. And then turning the corner to “OCTOPUS!!! OCTOPUS!!!!” Splitting up, they ran this way and that to slap their hands and fists on the fronts of any and every glass box in search of a reaction.
They got one. The Octopus shot up into the water and flashed a brilliant display of pattern and shape that soon caught their teacher’s attention. She gathered them together and brought them all over to explain that if frightened, an Octopus will squirt ink. I thought – not necessarily; perhaps he is all out of ink. The yelling changed “INK!!! INK!!! INK!!! I WANT INK !” More hands banged on the glass as he flashed through myriad transformations, and seeing that her lesson wasn’t going so well, she ushered them away.
On our first afternoon I stood still at the end of his tank for several hours, leaning into the wall to watch, draw and try to distinguish all of the different parts of his form. When there were no children to be afraid of, he too hung comfortably suspended between the back of a rock and the other corner of his tank and from each of our corners we both stayed still and watched.
The easiest shapes to grasp first were his eyes. One on each side of his head. An infinitely deep black slit, edged horizontally above and below with parallel white eye-lids. Each bright eye was held at the very centre of a softly dished and rounded mass of cartilage. He seemed able to lift each mass independently, so that either side of his whole head could rise or fall or very slightly rotate, yet he couldn’t expand or retract the volume of it. The head seemed to be a fixed form that was slightly mobile. He would widen or narrow his eyes with alarm or interest and close them to go to sleep. Everything else was subject to infinite change. The skin around his eyes, his whole head, mantle and limbs expressed delicate and largely symmetrical patterns of black, brown and cream that could ripple like sunlight in a shallow brook.
He kept his head perfectly still above his body, like a spirit level over a molten mass. His mantle, a soft rounded envelope of muscle cupping his body to give a continuous pulse. Pale on the underside and patterned above, it opened into a huge chamber just beneath his head. The tip of a small yellow siphon poked out to the right side of his neck, and pumped water ceaselessly. Behind the siphon was a large black spot with a cream edge and I could see a similar pattern on the other side of him.
Suddenly, something plunged into the middle of the tank and he took off shocked, flew one full circuit and landed back, flat against the wall. In between us was now a soft, bright white, human arm. It belonged to a young woman, who clearly could not see very well from the lab upstairs. She was feeling down into the water to find his pile of rocks and now up to her armpit, the sleeve of her T shirt was dangerously close to getting wet. Once she had found the rocks, she carefully laid them out. The little mountain was being slowly dismantled before it would be just as carefully built back into a new stimulating shape. He relaxed, glided off the wall and went down to help. It now seemed as though they had both been through all of this, many times before. Two tentacles stretched tenderly towards the rock that she too was reaching for, while others stroked her extended wrist. Softly, she batted him off. Undeterred he came back to have another go, and again got a waft. Soon all of the rocks were in position and satisfied that they were stable, her arm withdrew.
Then came the sponge. Brand new, bright yellow, and on a long white stick. He vanished. Uninterrupted, she could take all the time in the world to clean this ‘uninhabited’ case. Rubbing and polishing each side, one then another and at last the third. And when she had finished, all that remained, was a swirl of white sediment dissolving slowly into the light.
Now came the hoover. A clear plastic suction tube, which with a vigorous electric shaking movement pierced the mirrored surface of the now rippling tank and began to pull long delicate strings of faeces out from all of his pebbles and grit. To my surprise, he too came out and grabbed it. This was an eight arm death-lock on the hoover tube and not letting go. Jolting up and down and up and down, limbs squeezing tighter and tighter around the plastic coated swirl of this week’s completed digestions. The Octopus and the hoover tube both left the tank. Moments later, he returned. Dropped in, without his prey, motionlessly sinking slowly down through the grey space in front of me with all the shame of a public failure. The hoover tube returned. And again, he grabbed it.
There were now two brightly lit human arms in the display case, each glowing against the back wall. One progressed slowly and carefully with house work while the other continued trying to detach the Octopus. But with one hand versus eight, who could win? Soon she only cupped her fingers gently to shield him from the open end of the hoover, and he stayed onboard for the full duration of his clean out. When she had finished, I did wonder how she would ever remove him.
The hoover, now switched off, was angled like a boat oar, half in and half out of the tank with the Octopus still firmly attached. They waved slowly together. Left to right. Right to left. Left a little more, down, and sharply up. She was obviously no longer looking into the tank, but reaching for something, that was somewhere behind her. And I missed it.
In a lightning strike, I caught only a glimpse of the pink thing now engulfed in a tumbling mass of happy animal, working muscular limbs, body and mouth parts inward to crush and suck every morsel of juice from his favourite treat: a live shrimp.
Late afternoon was always a quiet time. Schools had gone home and young lovers mooched past with i-phones and sometimes prams. Before long my subject was sinking into a large pink conch shell arranged at the front of his case. From a vertical height he poured himself down in a straight line directly into it, until nothing but his head poked out of the opening. This time he went fully to sleep and a passing guard, on seeing my problem, laughed and with kindness leaned over to say “Huh, you won’t see nuthin o’ him now til tomorrow. That’s his favourite place to sleep.” Favourite? He gave me a beaming smile, and then tossed his keys to a colleague on his way out through the swing glass doors to go home. I moved around to the front of the case, and kneeling as close as I could to the shell, began a long slow study of his head.
In the morning the main road through Waikiki was a canal, with four inches of oily grey water lapping the brim of both pavements and a swell of bow and stern waves between every car flowing through it. Confusingly, it was hot, and anyone in bikinis and shorts balanced their surfboards on their heads and made a dash for it. Looking down at my heavy leather mountaineering boots, I knew they were going to breach, so took the long way round.
When I found him, he was busy with vigorous exercise, in a pattern I had seen at intervals the day before. A liquid side shimmy that if I was a musician perhaps I would describe as an eight to one beat. Eight-arm-ripple-swish, then a body-bob. Eight-arm-ripple-swish, then a body-bob. In this unbroken rhythm he made his way in a straight line across the top of the glass from left to right. Then in a sort of 123, 123, 123 but with 8, he shuffled down to the bottom right hand corner. Changing to face the other way, at exactly the same speed, he came back again. Eight arm-ripple-swish then a body-bob. Eight-arm-ripple-swish then a body-bob. I could almost get the hang of it. Pen ready I made a start.
But how. All those limbs, muscular and deceptively strong, yet floating as soft as mucous filaments, each able to extend, retract, rotate simultaneously in any direction and at any point along their length. I have never seen anything so impossible to watch.
“NEMOOOOOOO!!!!” A little girl ran through with flashing trainers on her feet. He got up and copied her footwear so that as she ran past him her shoe pattern flickered perfectly across his skin. The little herald of a new coach party.
He sunk down into the grit and became a grey colour. Less stimulating than an array of flashing patterns, the children seemed to miss him and run onward into the dark to search for brighter fish. After they had all gone, he got up and with both eyes more widely open, floated nearer. I realised he was taking a closer look at what it was that was still standing at the end of his tank. Perfectly still, I looked back at him discreetly moving my pen to quickly capture this beautiful moment of curiosity. He floated in a soft shape that I could at last encompass and his tentacles were relatively still. At length, he drifted off, settled on a rock and became its exact colour.
Children wandered closer and he put up a display of thorns all over his body. Almost invisible, the outer layer of his skin spread like a mucous web over the concrete. As a translucent haze it lifted to defy location. Smoke rising through a forest of tiny scales as sharp as volcanic rock. I tried to draw this as quickly as I could. It was my turn to run. Eyes fixed on the movement of his skin, I held the pen loosely in my finger tips and tried to imagine I could touch this texture, making an inquisitive response to the razor sharp fear of cutting my skin.
Then something happened. A child hit the tank with their fist and he landed flat against the glass in front of my body. Motionless, he became the colour of my coat. I looked at the child and they ran away. When they had gone he lifted off the glass to face me. Quickly I turned the page and was now running my pen through this new shape, as he hung relatively still while we watched each other.
The Octopus dropped down to my drawing board which was leaning away from me, bridged between my diaphragm and his case. It was tilted so that in the dark, I could borrow his light. I was holding a small thin rectangle of sanded plywood with the pages of a dismantled notebook taped to it. He worked his tentacles along the lower edge as if trying to feel, or as I now understand, taste it. Then he disappeared underneath. Holding the board as still as I could to not jolt him, I too leaned over the side. With my head upside down, I could see his tentacles spilling more rapidly across the full width of the board, as if measuring it. His head was bobbing this way and that, with a rapid curiosity.
After a while, he gathered himself into a tight rippling mass, and returned to the upper side. I too slowly returned and we continued to watch each other as he climbed the glass in front of me, stopping to hang loosely at the level of my head and now looking directly into my face, with one eye, peering carefully over the thickened rim of his foot.