Mongooses in Hawai’i They brought mongooses to Hawai’i to keep rats the hell out of the sugar cane fields. Seventy-two of them from Jamaica in 1883. Turns out mongooses sleep when rats are eating Frosted Flakes, and are awake and hunting when rats are fat and safely sleeping and dreaming of red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting. So the mongooses ate a bunch of other stuff instead. Like threatened bird species, your garden, sea turtle eggs, small pet dogs and cats, ground nesting birds’ eggs, and other such menu items served up at the all-you-can-eat buffet once called the Sandwich Islands. The authorities kindly asked the mongooses to leave, even offered to fly them business class to Jamaica, and sponsor welcome-home parties for them as heroes and victors, coming back from 100 years at sea. But the mongooses liked Hawai’i, and said “No, thanks. We’re staying here. We’re pretty happy. Why don’t you send the Haoles back where they came from? At least we were invited. Nobody asked them to come. Leave us alone.” Mongooses thrived, and now hold some minor political offices around Honolulu, and run corner stores and liquor distributorships in Palolo and Kalihi, and St. Louis Heights, and Hawai’i Kai. It makes people nervous, especially with a governor’s race coming up. There are a lot of mongooses—they breed like rabbits—and they vote. The locals wonder if their next governor could be a mongoose, and with good reason. They don’t talk about this on the mainland much. The rats find all of this funny as hell, and have developed Political Action Committees to support mongoose candidacies. It’s a nervous collaboration, but together, that’s a lot of votes. They’ve made deals of various sorts, with one of the key agreements being that mongooses keep their diurnal schedule. We’ll see how that goes. Hawai’i is a one-of-a-kind place, and some of these stories rarely get told off-island. But mongooses are making their mark in social media, so it is likely that their fate will be more widely known in the not-too-distant future. I wanted to share it here, because I think it is an important part of life in the Hawai’ian Islands. I don’t like the “send the Haoles home” platform, but honestly, the guys currently running the state are not exactly knocking it out of the park, so I try to keep an open mind about it all… (I do write some fiction-y pieces from time to time, along with poetry…So here you go…)

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