The Professor, the Pool Guy, and the Paniolo

A young child with a mysterious blood disease. A widening gyre that mobilizes people from Hilo to Japan into a support team. A most unusual subplot involving the stock market and country music. Stay tuned to this true story as told in real time in these pages—because even we don’t know where it’s headed.

Orchestrated and conducted by Mark Panek. To read previous chapters, click here.

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Chapter 6 – Kenken Needs A Miracle
And This Hawaiian Cowboy Paddler Is On It

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Kenken needed a miracle.

And I’d seen miracles happen with my own two eyes when my Mom and the Aunties up at the Waimea church I’d gone to my entire life got together and prayed for somebody. When we were kids my Mom would pray so that we would be kept safe when we was supposed to get stomped by a raging bull or fall off a horse going 40 mph with no rein control. Or car accidents I was supposed to get into: she prayed so hard for us to be safe, and it was always a miracle that we were.

But Kenken was different from any kid I knew his age—I’d seen this with my own two eyes, too, way back when he was just six years old. So the more I thought about it, I felt like Mom and the Aunties were going to have, like, a head start.

For me, it all started one day a few years ago in the middle of long distance paddling season, which for Mark and me meant maxing out all a human being can possibly do in 24 hours, seven days a week. We had committed to each other and seven other paddlers to try to get our bodies into the best possible condition to do a brutal five-plus-hour race. It’s not at all impossible or hard, but you add in raising a family, trying to have a successful marriage, being a good father, having a successful career, maintaining your property, maintaining good friendships, and also trying to get some kind of side job that will inch us a little bit in front of where we are—well, I guess it does get hard to do.

Mark wrote books and played music as a side hustle, and I’d be moving cows around on my ranch or working on my Dad’s truck. It was always our norm. We’d sometimes help each other with projects like the slab or framing of Mark’s rental house, or pounding posts for miles and miles of fencing on my or my Dad’s ranch. Through all of this we still continued to punish ourselves paddling three-four days a week all summer because the Moloka‘i Hoe, where you paddled together across more than 40 ocean miles from Moloka‘i to O‘ahu—it meant everything to us after you take our families out of the equation.

Anyway, this one day a few weeks before the race Mark showed up for practice with little Kenken by his side holding his own kid-sized paddle, and Mark actually asked our Coach if his six-year-old son could come along with us. Noriko had been called in for overtime, he told our Coach, and Grandma Jane was on Long Island for her regular summer stay with Mark’s sister. Mark had no one to watch Kenken, so it was either miss practice, leave him on the beach for all that time, or bring him with us since our nine-man crew (plus our Coach) would be using two six-man canoes, which left an empty seat for him anyway.

We all figured Mark had driven all the way down to the beach just to show his dedication to the crew, since missed practices were always out of the question unless there were family issues or you needed to care for your children. Me? There is absolutely no one I’d leave on this beach while we paddled for two and a half hours, so I’m thinking things like: good effort, Mark, but if you really have no one to watch Kenken, it is what it is, you didn’t need to drive all the way down here, just eat it, family is most important, a call would’ve been fine.

The whole time you could see Kenken with his head down, side-eyeing our reactions to his Dad’s question, like he’s thinking, Dad, this isn’t such a good idea, they don’t want me going out with them. It was the same look he has when Mark tells him to say hello to an adult and look them in the eye when they meet, like: Dad! You’re embarrassing me!

“Panek? He coming with us!”

I couldn’t believe it. Our Coach is saying this, with a big smile on his face. Kenken is all of six years old, not even old enough to compete it an official children’s race. I thought, is Coach thinking clearly, putting Kenken’s life on the line because he feels Mark’s training should come first? Is he putting this race before Kenken’s safety? Is Mark thinking clearly? We’re going to put this kid through six or eight miles out into the deep blue, and six miles back, including the last half hour in the dark?

Really?

I don’t know why, but out of eleven experienced watermen, including me, not one guy stood up and said, “Eh boyz, maybe this isn’t the best idea…” Maybe it was that you’re just supposed to do what Coach says, or that most of the guys had watched Kenken in the water from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. every Saturday regatta day the whole summer. And the bay was actually pretty calm that day.

Plus our Coach—a monster paddler himself, more fit than any one of us—he had been running a keiki paddling program over the summer, and he’d gotten to know not just how Kenken paddled, but how he handled himself around the canoe and did his part when it was time to take the canoe out of the water after practice. He also knew what Mark knew because of his pool: Kenken wasn’t just a natural swimmer who could go for hours, no problem. He would never panic out there, even if we did huli. And with the flat conditions out there that day, we weren’t very likely to huli. Besides, we would have one other canoe alongside us in case we went down for some very odd reason.

I can’t even imagine what Kenken was thinking. Just because I knew how humble and shy he can be, I could tell that he was actually really excited and proud of himself about how the crew and especially his Coach were all treating him. He climbed over the gunnel and took his seat right in front of mine with his game face on, like he’d been paddling with a crew full of grown men his whole life.

I was pretty amazed that he actually paddled as long as he did without getting tired. He would not stop. His timing was off and he’d get in the way of me paddling, so sometimes I’d ask him to stop for a little if we were trying to get on a wave. He’d halfway look back at me as if he was upset I’d asked him to stop, but he never said anything. We pretty much banged paddles the entire time but not once did he look worried.

Once in a while whene we were out there it would hit me: this kid is six. He’s barely older than my son, who just started kindergarten. I mean, why is he not afraid all the way out here? He’s never been out in the deep blue seas, but he’s as calm as anyone. All he wants to do is paddle, and whenever I ask him to stop, he puts his paddle on the gunnel with a grin that says, Really? Again Uncle Shane? Just let me paddle! But again, he wouldn't say anything.

Well, we made it back to the beach and everyone fell into the routine of grabbing the dolly and pulling the two canoes one-by-one up to the halau. Kenken knew exactly what to do: he collected everyone’s paddle and ran up to stand them neatly against the halau. He put the bailers away. Basically anything to help while we pushed these four-hundred-pound boats across the sand. We circled up at the end and grasped hands in the center before Coach led us in our usual team cheer, and Kenken’s little hand was joined right there to everyone else’s.

From then on it became routine that Kenken would make every practice, even if Mark did have childcare. For six solid weeks, three times a week, Kenken got to experience things no other six-year-old would ever be allowed to do. And just like us, he got stronger and stronger. His confidence soared with every stroke. He got more and more comfortable, even when conditions were a little bigger out there. The crew also got used to having him out there with us, even on those bigger days. He and I would still bang paddles a lot, but it got to be maybe half as much as that first day. I now wonder if he’d felt he would actually be doing the race with us, too.

After our final big Saturday run, I don’t think I would have blamed him for thinking that. Every paddler will tell you that he most important training day if you’re doing the Moloka‘i Hoe is the Saturday two weeks before the race. It’s your last long run out in the hot sun before you start tapering down so you’re well rested for race day, so there’s never any thought about missing practice, let alone about the ocean conditions, because the Moloka‘i Hoe is no joke. Seasoned paddlers have actually died trying to do that race. You have the heat. The distance. For most of the day you’re basically right out in the middle of the biggest ocean on the planet, so you’re actually hoping for some heavy seas on that last Saturday run just to get used to it.

Well for us, Saturday did not disappoint. The sun was already beating down when we put the canoes in the water, and it was barely 8:00 a.m. You only needed to look at the big white breakers stretching all the way up the Hamakua coast to know that Civil Defense was probably on the edge of their seats ready to call a small-craft warning. If the channel was what we wanted to prepare for, we couldn’t have asked for a better day, so even just paddling out through the bay, you could tell that every guy in both boats was just hungry, even Kenken.

Even Kenken.

Even Kenken? 

By now we were so used to having him out with us that it only crossed my mind for a second that we were taking a six-year-old out in pretty heavy conditions on a very hot day, not three hours into the open ocean, but six hours. There’s a difference between paddling in the evenings when the sun is going down and it’s cooling off, and a day like today, when the sun would be at its strongest midway through our practice. I wasn’t even sure some of the men would be able to have enough stamina to make it back. 

On top of that, the ocean really was almost at small-craft warning level: rough, big ten-foot swells with some wind, not the safest day at all for anybody to be out. It was one of those days that actually scares even 10-year veterans to just paddle around in the bay. The guys sitting in seats one and two rose so high in the air whenever the canoe crested a wave that their paddles couldn’t even grab water, and we were headed all the way to Pepekeo, the very farthest point up the coast you can barely see from Hilo Bay. 

You would think a kid who liked playing Star Wars with his Legos would at least look a little bit worried out in this. But not Kenken. He was totally unfazed for so many reasons. He’d been prepared first by his Dad in the pool. Then by his Coach. Then by all these weeks coming out with us. Our attitude toward him must have made him sure he could do anything, not one guy ever questioning him being there. The simplest way I could say it is that Kenken was taking an opportunity and staring it in the eye.

Three brutal hours of guys plowing through surf, splashing each other on the back once in a while for temporary relief from the heat, guys in seats three and four pulling their paddles out of rotation to bail all of the heavy water that kept spilling over the gunnels of each boat, or to guzzle a mouthful of water, and we finally reached the halfway mark where we could stop to take a break.

We’d been out so long that the atmosphere took on the feeling of almost a whole different day, especially now that a little squall had rolled in begun dumping a steady stream of cooling rain. It brought such relief that everyone just sat there in silence, tuning in with the giant rolling waves, the air now still enough you could hear the drops hitting the ocean with a hiss. Like everyone else, Kenken sat leaning to his left to put weight on the ama, his paddle now resting on both gunnels, a big smile covering his face as he let the rain wash over him.

When we turned around I could barely make out Hilo, way, way off on the horizon. Instead of distinct buildings like Bay Front Towers or the pink of St. Joe’s church, it was all just a distant blur. I guessed that home was now maybe sixteen miles away. The whole gang looked pretty good, though, and this little patch of rain would be a big help, so I wasn’t too worried about getting us home. But man, it was far! 

I could also tell that the waves were going to challenge us on the way home. These bombs the size of semi-trucks kept rolling in sideways, almost perpendicular to the direction we were headed. This hadn’t been so bad on the way out, because going in that direction our ama was protecting us from huli-ing. On the way back, both boats would have their ama facing the swell. (If you can imagine that the point of the outrigger itself is to keep the canoe from flipping, but that now the outrigger is directly facing oncoming surf that pushes it above the level of the boat half the time, you can picture what I mean.)

I’d steered in way worse conditions, but nobody wanted to huli all the way out here even if we did have two canoes, because the other thing about the coastline we’d just paddled along is that it’s almost completely a sheer cliff, with maybe two or three places along the whole sixteen miles where you could come ashore without getting smashed on the rocks.

So on we went, now everybody leaning a little on the ama side in their seats, especially when a bigger set rolled under us.

There’s a point in every long-distance race where you have to fight through a kind of mind-fuck where your brain keeps telling you you’re not getting anywhere. With the Moloka‘i Hoe, it’s right off Hanauma Bay. I swear there’s some kind of time warp there, because you just paddle and paddle and the Honolulu skyline way ahead of you just stays exactly the same the whole time, never getting any closer.

Well if that’s what we needed to prepare for, we were right in the middle of a perfect practice session, because the more we pushed on our way home, the more it seemed like Hilo was just that blur of confused shapes along the endless green-gray coast. On top of that, we were at that point on a rolling day like this where if you let your mind wander too far off from what you were doing, even in a craft as small as a 40-foot canoe moving right at water level, you could start to get seasick.

Dizzy.

Pale.

Kenken?

No, not Kenken. 

Kenken didn’t look pale, or dizzy, or at all tired.

For the first time all day, though, he did look worried. And it wasn’t about the big swells rolling into our ama.  No, the boy’s whole look of concern was all about the strongest paddler in either canoe, by far, a model of human fitness and commitment to physical excellence, the man we were counting on most to lead us along that long final stretch home.

You’d never believe it, but Kenken was worried about our Coach, who suddenly looked like he was about to pass out.

Already down a man in each canoe even if you included Kenken, there wasn’t much we could do. I tried letting the Coach steer so I could paddle instead, but on a day like this, steering actually took at least as much energy as paddling.

In the end, we would spend the next three hours trying to make it back home without calling HFD to come rescue us, with our Coach in need of an I.V.,  just totally exhausted.

Hours later, by the time we finally pulled the canoes up onto the Hilo sand, so much had happened since we’d set off early that morning that it actually seemed like days had passed. Along the way somebody had come up with the idea to leave our Coach with the lifeguards at Honoli‘i Beach Park, where a rogue backset of waves almost smashed us on the reef while we were waiting for them to paddle out to us on their rescue board. That last stretch across Hilo Bay, so calm compared to the heavy seas we’d been out on all day, it seemed to lull everybody into that exhausted kind of trance you get when you’re so tired you actually have trouble sleeping.

Still, there was Kenken: collecting all the paddles and leaning them up against the halau without a word, grabbing the bailers, putting a hand on the gunnel of one of the canoes to help roll it across the scalding sand. There was Kenken, clasping hands at the center of the circle while somebody—not our Coach, who had failed to do what Kenken did that day—while somebody else mustered up an exhausted team cheer.

I still don’t know what we were thinking taking him out with us—not just that Saturday, but at all. I know I would never, ever have taken my Kahiau out where we were going. Not at six years old. No way. Not without a life vest.

But Kenken is different. That’s obvious now. Worst-case scenario, we do huli out there? This kid can swim, probably like, better than some of the guys that are in the boat. He’s not a drowner. He’s not gonna panic and freak out. That’s the thing with him.

And the other the thing is, everyone in the canoe: we would never let each other down no matter what. You think we rallied around our Coach when he got seasick? What if it was Kenken? Everyone on that boat, on both boats, I’m sure of it, what didn’t even need to be said, was that if anything really heavy did happen to us out there, every man out there would make sure that the last guy to go under would be Kenken.

To Be Continued

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Raised by legendary Parker Ranch Rough Rider Gordon Kalaniopio, first-time author Shane Kalaniopio spent a decade building homes for Waimea’s Quality Builders before taking a Hawai‘i County carpentry position in closer proximity to the 80-acre Kulani ranch he and his wife Pua are building to pass family traditions down to their son Kahiau and daughter Lihau. The couple has been recognized by the Puna Soil and Water District as the Outstanding Cooperator of 2018.

Kensuke Panek is a writer living in Hilo.

Father of Kensuke, husband of Noriko, Mark Panek has been living in and writing about these islands for three decades—two of those as a professor of creative writing at the University of Hawai‘i. His writing has been recognized with awards from Bamboo Ridge and the Hawai‘i Book Publisher’s Association. A 2013 winner of the Elliot Cades Award, Panek was also honored with two titles on Honolulu Magazine’s juried list of 50 Essential Hawai‘i Books: Hawai‘i and Big Happiness: The Life and Death of a Modern Hawaiian Warrior. He’s also the author of Gaijin Yokozuna: The Life of Chad Rowan.

Serial entrepreneur and first-time author Dave Gagne moved from Boston to Los Angeles to Paris, France before settling in Puna with his wife Niko fifteen years ago. Father of Noah and Mia, Dave owns and operates Pine Coast Pool Service, and recently founded an investment company with his brother Bill.

The Professor, The Pool Guy, and The Paniolo will feature and alternate contributions from Panek, Gagne, Kalaniopio, and possibly others. This serial real-time true-life novel was conceived by and is orchestrated and conducted by Mark Panek.

Image by Nick Linnen.