Four kids are taking turns rubbing sticks together. They’re trying to make fire, and they’re pretty close.
In the lee of a patch of banana trees they kneel in a circle, twisting a stick between their hands the way you’d make a snake out of Play-Doh. Noland Conjugacion looks on, his shock of white hair done up samurai-style. “Fix your posture,” he coaches. It’s surprising advice: When I was a kid, all the advice I got from my scoutmaster was, “Faster!” But it turns out to be a good tip: The kids adjust their bodies and become more efficient. Soon there’s billowing smoke and a lot of blowing into a fistful of dry tinder; a flame sprouts. Mission accomplished, for this group, anyway. The younger fire-making groups still have their work cut out for them.
This is the first day of the Hawaiian Inside Tracking Camp. A dozen 8- to 12-year-olds are just at the start of a four-day class in wilderness skills. The older kids, 12 to 18, have already completed four or more years of training; they’ve been honing their skills here for the past five days. The Hawaiian Inside Tracking Camp, or HIT, is the brainchild of musician and tracking expert “Brother” Noland Conjugacion. Brother Noland is better known in Hawai‘i as a musician and member of an Island super-group of sorts: Noland and fellow guitarists John Cruz and Henry Kapono tour together as The Roughriders. They chose the name not for Teddy Roosevelt but rather in honor of the Hawaiian paniolo (cowboys) who traveled to the Mainland and dominated at the 1908 Frontier Days World Championship rodeo, stunning a public who had little idea that Hawai‘i even had cowboys.
It’s an appropriate name, too, because Noland, who grew up hunting, camping and fishing on Moloka‘i, is as accomplished an outdoorsman as he is a guitarist. His award-winning book, The Hawaiian Survival Guide, is a basic—and hilarious—introduction to surviving the islands’ wilds, or any wilds, really. Marooned on a beach? The Hawaiian Survival Guide gives a good primer on building shelters out of driftwood. Hungry for ‘opihi, the limpet snails that hug rocks in the surf zone? Go pick ’em, but “if you don’t feel safe turning your back to the waves,” says the guide, “you shouldn’t be picking ‘opihi.” And, of course, there is the all-important chapter, “How to Poop in the Woods,” with special consideration given to which Hawaiian plants make the best TP.
When I ask whether he considers himself a professional musician or a professional tracker, Brother Noland laughs. “They’re the same thing. For both, I’m just trying to find the tempo.”
The upbeat starts at 4 a.m., when neither man nor beast has any business being awake. Yet a dozen junior trackers, six young adult graduates and a handful of instructors walk silently through the dark wilderness of West Moloka‘i. No flashlights. To be fair, a full moon hangs low in the sky, bright enough to read a license plate by, if there were one around to read. We arrive at a clearing the size of two football fields, and with a few soft-spoken directions, the kids each venture off on their own to find a quiet place to sit, watch for an hour and hopefully spot an axis deer. Brother Noland watches them disappear in the low brush around the clearing, then motions for me to sit. “Step into my office,” he whispers with a moonlit grin.
An hour passes while Brother Noland (I feel compelled to call him “uncle”) quietly explains the exercise. This is hāmau ka leo, literally “to close the mouth” but Brother Noland calls it “quiet sit”. Maybe a bit simple and self-explanatory, but the experience is very powerful: Being alone, unsupervised and quiet all at the same time is something these—and maybe even most—children never get to do. To me it sounds like meditation: Sit down, shut up, pay attention. To Noland it’s a hunting skill. As the eastern sky brightens, we scan the treeline for deer. “They’ve been here,” Noland says. “I’ll show you.” He stands and makes a loud, guttural bark. “Deer call,” he tells me. The kids rise from their hiding spots like startled meerkats and gather around. Noland points to deer tracks at his feet, and a lesson begins.
Cool as all this knowledge is, one might still ask: What’s the point? When’s the last time you had to stalk a deer for your next meal or light a fire without matches to keep from freezing to death (I live in the tropics for a reason). Wilderness survival training is interesting but mostly academic, even atavistic, a kind of nostalgia for the bad old days when we were post-apes walking upright and outrunning big cats. But there’s more to it than just learning to get by in the wild, and I get a glimpse of that bigger picture on our hike back to civilization.
Brother Noland spots a conspicuous and messy track in the dirt and asks a graduate to decrypt the story behind it. The young tracker identifies a rut, probably made dirtbike tire, and a constellation of hoofprints alongside it. Horses startled by a motorcyclist? Noland smiles. Guitar thief, it turns out, who tried to ride off with one of The Roughriders’ instruments. The band then gave chase on horseback. After the laughter dies down, a serious Noland asks, “When did this happen?” The kid, Rob Yos, answers confidently. “This must have been Tuesday, just after the rains. He was riding through mud, there.” The lesson hammers home the idea that tracking isn’t just about finding animals (or fleeing dirtbikes); it’s about seeing interactions in the world. When you can interpret tracks and signs, you begin to understand the tempo of the land.
The tempo for the rest of the day is that of a laid-back waltz. There’s food and swimming and fishing and even time for a nap in transit to Bobby Alcain’s farm. The students tend Bobby’s garden, make kim chee and de-worm a goat; you know—the basics. Their wilderness skills do get tested during these mundane farm chores, such as demonstrating the proper knot when tying up a goat. A bowline knot keeps the goat secure (not that it really needs securing; it’s as tame as a lap dog) while its hooves get trimmed. Dinner at Bobby’s farmhouse is a combo of poi, dried fish and “‘äina stew” that features every ripe vegetable found on the land that day and beef from a neighborhood cow. After dinner the kids are still cruising and talking even though they’ve been up for longer than sixteen hours; no one seems sleepy. I review what they’d eaten that day: fruit, fresh meat and veggies. Sugar and caffeine, while not forbidden, are rare. The moderate tempo means that the students have enough energy to pay attention, to not sleep through the classes.
“This course is a mix-plate,” Brother Noland says at dinner. “A little bit of Native American lore, skills from the Mainland, but we still make it Hawaiian. This is like Boy Scouts, Hawaiian-style.” The students and instructors are a mix-plate as well. These are average kids, alums of the workshops Noland runs weekly in Honolulu (twice a year for University of Hawaii-Hilo students). Noland invites the most well-behaved and willing students from these workshops to run the gauntlet for a week in the forests and on the shores of Moloka‘i. And while the lessons draw deeply from Hawaiian knowledge and values, the students aren’t exclusively or even mostly Hawaiian; they, too, are a mix-plate of Hawai‘i’s ethnicities. The result is a learning environment where students are ready to perform—and survive whatever Noland throws at them.
We’re relaxing in a little grass shack overlooking Keawanui fishpond. There is a spring-fed pond nearby and the students are taking advantage of the break to cool off. Brother Noland and I fulfill the role of “adult supervision,” which means we get to sit and talk story. All this started in the ’80s, he says, when the notable Hawaiian activist and Moloka‘i resident Walter Ritte studied the knowledge of indigenous trackers from around the world and developed a philosophy that promotes environmentalism and cultural awareness. Ritte and renowned tracker John Stokes, who founded the Tracking Project in New Mexico, were giving a beachside talk in Moloka‘i one day when Noland, then a budding musician, came ashore from spearfishing. He stuck around and listened, resonating with the concept under discussion: that while each of the worlds’ wildernesses have their individual nuances, some tracking and survival skills are universal, whether you’re in Kathmandu or Kaunakakai. To Noland it was like listening to new and different music: If you listen long enough with an attentive ear, you can begin to play along. With practice you might even get good. “Tracking, music, whatever, it crosses over into life,” Noland says. “I started teaching this to perpetuate Hawaiian values and show that aloha is universal.”
Noland fine-tuned his tracking skills in New Mexico with John Stokes’ Tracking Project, with the idea of a Hawai‘i-based tracking school marinating the whole time. He worked through several iterations, learning from and teaching in a handful of teen intervention programs including the Boy’s Club and Palama Settlement. Tracking, turns out is a useful tool for helping at-risk youth, Noland says. “It can teach you to track yourself, check in. I told them, ‘Ask yourself why are you acting this way? You angry? Impulsive?’”
While we talk an impromptu diving competition starts up among the kids, and Brother Noland calls every dive. “Watch Amber Yee. Miss Perfect. Cannonballs or wood carving, she does it all perfect. Now check out Nathan Yee, her brother.” He charges into the water with a flailing dive designed for maximum splash. “He does everything powerful. Especially escrima. He hits hardest of them all.” Escrima, the Filipino stickfighting art? I ask. “Rhythm,” Noland nods.
Three instructors and several friends from the community assist Noland with the tracking camps, but the education is never watch-and-learn. It’s try-and-fail-and-fail-and-succeed. The instructors coach but don’t interfere. The message: You can do this. And sometimes they can. The skills themselves are fairly basic, but they take practice. Mere proficiency is not the goal. Mastery is. This mastery does, of course, require the use of large knives, and students as young as eight years old wield them capably, whether for the mundane task of cutting of cordage or for impressive whittling. When one young student attempts a task with the knife blade from a multitool, instructor Meleokalani Beter corrects him. “Ask your father for a full-size knife for your birthday. Some pocket knives are a bit dangerous,” she says. What’s full-size? Something between a Rambo knife and a Swiss army knife. Mele recommends an “old-timer,” a type of knife with a thick blade and sturdy locking backs hidden inside wood handles. They won’t cut off your fingers if you use them the wrong way.
Not all the training happens in the forest. Every spare moment spent by the sea, someone is throwing net, or trying to. They carefully position the lead-weighted circumference while draping folds of a dripping net over an arm or leg. Once all systems are go, the throw is a coordinated twist of the body and spin of the net. La‘akea Yagodich is only 12, but he already has a decade of wilderness experience, and it shows: He carefully readies himself, hefts his net and throws like a pro.
La‘akea’s parents, Jenny and Palakiko Yagodich, watch with pride. Both are HIT instructors, as it seems their son is destined to one day also become. “He’s always throwing net,” says Palakiko, an assistant professor at Kapi‘olani Community College in Honolulu. “Cheapest babysitter ever.” The other students are also throwing net pretty well at this point in their training, but Palakiko reminds them that the throw is just one part. You have to throw it at something. “Tracking in the ocean is a different ballgame,” he tells them. You can’t see tracks, obviously, but “you can see the winds, currents, waves—all this will tell you where the fish are.” Or aren’t. The catches that day are all manini—small. That doesn’t stop exuberant throwing, though, and the meticulous inspection of each insignificant haul.
For the last class of HIT, the tempo is slow. Brother Noland starts class on a cliff overlooking Kalaupapa, the peninsula on the north coast of Moloka‘i. Cool winds climb the three-thousand-foot sea cliffs as the instructors share a few parting skills. Students feel (and some taste) the moss that grows only on the north side of trees—a natural compass. Fallen branches from the ironwood trees get covered in needles and leaves, nature’s dry storage for fire-making tinder. The sap from the humble, native honohono plant is a good antiseptic for minor cuts.
The older students, graduates of the four-year curriculum hang back, talk softy and take pictures. I ask provocative questions like, “What was the worst part of this camp?” I’m expecting answers like the rain, the bugs or Brother Noland’s snoring. Corrina Jacang, 13, slight and soft-spoken is shaking her head. “The deer I got,” she mutters . I’d seen the gruesome pictures of her dressing and skinning her prey, and I assume she’s distraught by the gore. Apparently not. “It was a doe,” Corrina says. “I wanted a buck.”
Just then Brother Noland calls to the older trackers. “Come here and show me where to find water.” On the misty cliffside, a tracker pulls a strip of bark off a tree and squeezes a few drops. Unimpressed, Noland then asks them to point north, the direction of prevailing winds and where one would find dry tinder for firemaking. Noland’s drill-instructor interrogation continues until the older trackers are finally stumped. None of this is mean-spirited; it illustrates a point that wilderness skills are perishable unless applied.
In my mind, any HIT participant would make a great camping buddy because they have learned the beauty and value of nature, and they have a greater awareness of their surroundings. When I mention this to Mele, she agrees. “Tracking is basically awareness,” she says. If there were one aspect of tracking that bleeds over into her professional life as a lomilomi and lä‘au laupa‘au (herbal medicine) practitioner, it is awareness in dealing with people. People are, of course, large animals. If you can track them, she says, you can heal them.
I ask Palakiko and Jenny, standing nearby and silent during Noland’s grilling, what’s next for La‘akea? Professional hunter, trapper? The Hawaiian Bear Grylls? “Seventh grade is coming up,” Jenny says.
In other words, it’s not really about survival. It’s about nurturing well-rounded people with an appreciation for nature. People who can sit quietly, read the signs, respond intelligently in any situation. And, sure, people who could start a fire in a swamp if needed. You don’t have to light the barbeque by rubbing sticks together, but it’s important, says Noland, that these archaic skills get passed on. Most importantly, tracking reminds people of ancient and still relevant ways of relating to the world. “Humility,” Brother Noland says, “is knowing you are a part of nature, not against it.”
This story originally appeared in HANA HOU! The Hawaiian Airlines Magazine
Photos by the great P.F. Bentley