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BT: So we used to swimming in the river, hike up to the falls, any mountain area, there'll be a falls somewhere around there. Oh, they used to have, up on the side of the mountain, they used to have a lot of flumes. I don't know if you know what a flume is, flume that was built along the mountainside to bring water from the mountain down to the cane fields. And the plantation used to build these flumes. Not to get the, say, source of the water, and get into the flume, and it will flow down into the low part of the valley into the cane fields. And it looks like a three-sided box with the top open, but the top would have little slats to hold the whole thing together, and the water would flow down there. And, of course, in times, the flumes would get nice and mossy, green, and they would have lot of opaes in there, the little shrimp. So what we, as kids we used to do is, we used to get into the flume and squeeze yourself in there, and just flow down with the water. And as you flow down, every once in a while you come across a place where there's opae, you know. We'd scoop it all up as it flowed down. Real nice, you know, because all nice and mossy, you'd flow down with the water. [Laughs] The other thing I started to explain to Kent, the kiawe trees, I don't see it now, but they give out nice long yellow beans, hard beans. But the cattle used to like it, so we used to take gunnysacks and collect these things by the bagful and take it over to the dairies who would buy that for something like ten or fifteen cents a bag. And so we used to make pin money. It used to be a wonderful source of income for a lot of kids.

LD: Tell us about that, the way kids would make some money.

BT: Yeah, I mean, there's not much money to be made, so every little bit helps.

LD: Like collecting bottle caps, or collecting old bottles, collecting returnable bottles.

BT: Yeah, yeah, of course, that's today's. In our time, it wasn't that. It was kiawe beans. This is as much indicative of Hawaii as the sugar cane, this kiawe tree. It's not endemic to Hawaii, it came over from France, story of how kiawe... the first Catholic priests were sent over to Hawaii from France. Couple of them managed to stick some of the seeds into their pocket, and they brought it over to Hawaii.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 1983 The Center for Educational Telecommunications and Densho. All Rights Reserved.