I'd been good about keeping my shit clean, which isn't something to be proud of, but I was a fucking junkie — the standards were low. I'd never gotten infected, or accidentally hit an artery. I'd missed a few times and shot into the muscle, but as far as junkies went, I'd say I was doing okay. My arm looked like I'd taken the butt end of a cigar to it, but I didn't think she'd seen anything she'd have nightmares about later.
Despite that, I kind of wanted to apologize to her for what she had had to see. I hadn't really thought she had come to my room for any reason other than the one she had given me. I had no reason to. I was just being an ass. I heard her take a deep breath next to me.
"We have about a twenty minutes’ drive to go," she said.
"What?"
"Twenty minutes," she repeated, looking over at me. "We're going to Keahiakawelo. The Garden of the Gods."
Right, I had asked her where she was taking me. She wanted to tell me that? She didn't feel like talking about it more, what she saw and my addiction...that stuff. She wasn't going to tell me about an uncle she had who could be my sponsor in NA or whatever. I never brought my drug use up, but I sort of wanted to talk about it now, with her. I’d probably made her uncomfortable. It wasn’t really polite conversation.
"What's that?" I asked her, instead of getting back into it.
"You’ll see," she said, smirking. "The road near the place isn't paved at all, so it's going to get bumpy," she warned.
“You’re not telling me?” I asked.
“If you took the time to look at those pamphlets I left you with, you’d already know,” she said. I laughed. I wasn’t going to hear the end of that.
The road became bumpy, just like she’d warned. We passed miles and miles of nothing. No developments or properties. A section of the road was surrounded by trees, but they started thinning until there was hardly any plants at all. Just rocks.
She started slowing down as the road basically disappeared. I looked outside the window.
"What the fuck," I whispered. It looked like the surface of Mars or something. She parked the car, and we got out. There were rocks everywhere, in stacks and towers, spread out like someone had put them there.
"Come on," she said, walking past me. I followed her.
"What is this place?"
"Keahiakawelo. The Garden of the Gods. It's a natural rock garden," she explained.
"Natural? So it just looks like that by itself?" I asked. She smiled.
"That depends on who you ask,” she said. She started walking down a slope between these large, stacked boulders. I followed her. “Today, we know that it was natural forces that made it look like this. Wind. Water. Centuries of erosion without human activity. It’s red like that because of the volcanic rock and clay soil.”
“Why is it called the Garden of the Gods? Was it a spiritual site or something?”
“It’s named after Kawelo, an ancient priest who presided over the island. The legend says he and the priest over on Molokai got into a little contest. They challenged each other to build a fire and keep it burning the longest. It’s bare like this because Kawelo used all the vegetation up for his fire. You should see it at sundown,” she said.
“What happens at sundown?”
“If I tell you, you’ll use it as an excuse not to come out again,” she said. Was that an invitation? I didn’t care; I was calling it one.
Whether the rocks were like that because of Ancient Hawai’ian gods, or just natural causes didn’t really make a difference to me. It was surprisingly really cool. Not just because I was on the island and needed to see it before I left. It was just cool. It was weirdly, really beautiful.
I was no history buff, but from what I’d seen, this place was practically virgin land, just like my driver had said when I’d got here. So much of it was just allowed to be instead of being made into something else. I liked it. It was different from LA in a good way. Even old Los Angeles was still pretty new. The oldest buildings in LA were what, a couple hundred years old, if that? This place had been this way for centuries.
We walked around some more, climbing up to some of the higher points so she could point out the bay and Molokai Island in the distance. I took some pictures. I wanted to remember it. Not just how it looked, but how I felt here. It was harsh, and empty and desolate, but it made me feel calm, like it existed independently of the island around it, and if I was here, I was somewhere else. Detached.
We got back into the car, driving a little farther before we started heading back to the resort.
“Thanks for taking me out today,” I told Abby once we’d gotten past the rocky stretch of road.
“You have my manager to thank for getting me out today, not me,” she said glancing over. “I’m glad you liked it.”
“I’m sorry about what I said to you. I know you were just trying to help.”
“Have you been okay today?” she asked.