On the Coconut / Theodore Engelhardt

I never cared much for coconuts, until I discovered what a pleasure it is, and what good exercise, to climb for them, and in particular to climb those very tall and slim specimens, whose fruit are the more palatable, in my experience. How I love to launch myself up a coconut palm! The scores of former fronds give my feet a satisfying and comfortable grip, and the living fronds are remarkably sturdy, and bear my weight reliably as I clamber about in them, yanking coconuts free. The coconut stems too are superlatively tenacious, to bear such heavy drupes, and it may sometimes therefore be hard work freeing them—but the obsessive forager within one, irrevocably awaked, will risk life and limb to remove them, nearly even to the extent of hanging freely from the stubborn coconut itself.
Often, often, either while drinking or plucking coconuts, or while carrying them home in fours, by the stems which serve well for handles, or while taking a break from carrying so many coconuts, I have been suddenly overawed by the gently blended coloring and ethereally soft grain upon the coconut’s elegant ovoid asymmetry. I find there is much religious compulsion in the coconut, in the beholding as well as in the passing-around. (Therefore they take prominent place in the mythologies of several world cultures, such as the Maluku myth of Hainuwele, a girl who emerged from a coconut blossom—or the Maldivian sorcerer who caused coconut trees to grow from the skulls of the fallen first settlers—or the Fijian crab-god, who sends human children away in a great buoyant coconut-half, when they do not obey their parents). They are so ripe for symbolism; they stir a drowsing mind in such odd directions. Once, after long study of them, as I drifted to sleep at the base of a coconut palm, in that peculiar transition-state between a more robustly objective experience of reality and a fluidly subjective one, filled with the scattering impressions of extended and deliberate focus, I felt keenly the desire to reach out my hand—by perspective made enormous in relation to the more distant coconut palm—and yank it out of the earth; and I could almost feel that familiar, wonderfully coarse texture within my grasp. Then, still resisting sleep, still trying to hold my eyelids open, and agitated by a head overly full of coconut palms—seeing that the palm beside me sat upon a layer of tangled, exposed roots, extending who knows how deep—I seemed to feel for a moment that I, too, was rooted to the ground, and could not move; which frustrated me, and I awoke.
It is possible, if one is lucky, to observe squirrels carving holes into coconuts. Far more frequently, however, one will merely find a coconut bearing the traces of an attempted breach, a fibrous, clawed, sappy-brown hollow, as it is probably infrequent that a squirrel, having taken a well-earned break from his work at the coconut, is able to recall just which nut he was working at before he took his rest.
When a coconut falls of its own, and breaks open, or has been left on the ground by someone who drank the juice but left the meat, you will find it full of hermit crabs. It is very funny, to kick the nut slightly, and watch the crabs come pouring out of it, as though they had been up to something mischievous. I have seen, in coconuts which were unevenly split, hermit crabs apparently trapped in the upturned greater portion, attempting continually to escape the slippery semi-sphere, and failing. It seems to me therefore very likely that over the course of so many years, hermit crabs must at some point have accidentally migrated from one landmass to another by sailing in one of these inescapable coconut vessels. Perhaps several hermit crabs in one coconut have migrated, and reproduced thereafter; or perhaps a single hermit crab, gravid with her thousands, has laid eggs and populated alone that new land. It must also have happened a great number of times, that a hermit crab has perished in his coconut-half from too long a wandering over the sea; or perished from arriving in a new world without being at last turned over by the surf; or even arrived successfully, but been the only hermit crab for many miles, and lived a long life alone, and died alone.
But I must say, I have never had such a relationship with any food item in the past, as I do with the coconut. Their infinite spectrum of color and ripeness, their weight and shapeliness, the trouble which must be undergone in their acquisition—the weariness of hanging high up and yanking or twisting the tenacious ones free; the scraping of chest, hands and feet during the weary and unmeasured descent; the frightful swaying in the wind, when harvesting from those taller palms. I might go so far as to say that my love of fresh coconuts is oddly approaching the romantical. For example, I have distinctly the sense that the amount of trouble which the coconuts are to collect directly influences my appreciation of them. Is the coconut tastier, the higher up it grows—does the wind’s shaking brighten the taste—or is it merely that there was the canopy just below me as I picked it, and the sudden thunder of the surf crashing, once I poked my head into the open air, which enhances the taste on my descent?
I often stand over the coconuts I have acquired. I always keep a heap of them; my wife begs me not to pick so many—“Only two! No more! No!—I will not catch another, it’ll just break, and you will waste it!”—whereupon I drop two, safely, into the pile of old fronds, and bring one more down in my teeth. Ha! Ha! For I am overcome with something like hysteria, thinking that even if I do pick too many coconuts, I can just pass them out to anyone we meet—but, in the end, I keep them for myself. I stand over all my massive coconuts, I stare at them and consider which ones are for cracking against a tree trunk and drinking straightaway (the most perfect of this variety hiding, under the flower-cap, a sudden, secret, vivid pink hue), and which ones I will need to beat against a stone and tear the husk away from, leaving only the fibrous pale core—when I am very lucky, these are actually fizzy, as much as any store-bought carbonated beverage. I do not know what I shall do, when I am forced to give up this ready access to coconuts.
Having quite a large mattress, and a fitted sheet which is not quite large enough for it, I thought to hold two of the sheet corners in place with two of my largest, heaviest coconuts—but twice now, waking in the middle of the night from sweaty, restless sleep, I have found a cool coconut in my arms, another coconut on the floor, and the sheet corner snugly upon my head.
Strangely enough, though she is ostensibly joking, I sometimes feel that my wife is actually slightly upset by my love for them. What this means, I could not say. I do love coconuts so much!

Theodore Engelhardt is a Pennsylvanian poet living in Costa Rica, and working remotely. He is working on a “great Medieval compendium” of literary sketches of plants and animals, entitled respectively “The Herbarium” and “The Bestiary.”