How to Make Spiritual Pizza (For an Unspiritual Age)

First: arrive in Hawaii with no idea what you’re doing there. Bum around, sleep outside, get rid of all the stuff you brought to insulate you against the unknown. On second thought, hang on to the hydrogen peroxide. You need it for the wounds that come when you stop wearing shoes. Free up shampoo and learn that your hair starts to clean itself. Free up biodegradable dish soap and let the insects clean your dishes. Follow up with a healthy scrubbing of sand.

Free up your plans, let them fall through your fingers like so many Ni’ihau shells. Let the hike you came here to do remain shrouded in mystery and future tense. Meet many other misfits like yourself, who speak of the valley in reverent tones. They describe the pizza with such religious fervor, even a girl from New York has to wonder...what is so spiritual about cheese, sauce, and dough?

Reality intrudes on a Pacific interlude, Part I: Pre-conceived notions rarely hold their ground when confronted with real life experience. The miracle of transubstantiation is not just confined to the Catholic Church. Ordinarily repugnant products like spam and dried mushrooms are transformed on the eleven mile hike into fabulous cuisine. Not quite up to par with the body and blood of Christ, perhaps, but it beats communion wafers and sour grapes just the same. Something to ponder as the pods of whales splash and play in the briny deep.

Arriving at Haena, you set out in a scramble of excitement, quickly shredded by the merciless elevation gain. You will reach this valley through sheer determination. Long after wanting to get there has ceased to matter, your legs keep propelling the body and its burdens forward. You learn it is possible to fall uphill. This is preferable to falling off the 2,000 foot cliff. You narrowly miss this, to the amazement of the tourists, who block the trail at every photo-opportunity.

After a few miles its just you and the goats, who will kick scree down on your head. Watching rocks rattle past you and -PING!- into the void may inspire a meditation on mortality. Or a litany of aches and pains. By the time you descend Red Hill you will be ready to collapse in a sweaty heap on the grass. Upon awaking with hunger pains, you’ll eagerly accept the mayor’s invitation to dinner.

Reality intrudes on a Pacific interlude, Part II: The journey is essential to spiritual pizza. Just as important, in a non-cash based economy, is to arrive bearing gifts. With a pack full of food and a temperament disposed to sharing, a person can thrive long after her personal food stores run low. Freely giving and expecting nothing in return is simple humanity. Charity, her high-society sister, has a penchant for flinging cast-offs and coins at those who lack material possessions. People who have no food can fetch wood or water, forage for toppings, prep, do dishes, sing songs, play instruments, or otherwise make themselves instrumental to the process.

You will find that making spiritual pizza is an all day affair. Add yeast to flour and water, knead and cover. While the dough rises its time to prep the toppings and make the sauce. The sauce always starts with tomato paste and half a bulb of garlic. Let it simmer while you grease the 15.5 inch cast iron frying pan. Spread the dough into the pan and rub rosemary or sprinkle sesame seeds.

If you are the pilot of the pizza, you steer the whole production to completion without claiming ownership of the materials. When the dough is kneaded and the community’s contributions are layered two inches thick in the pan, it is time to check the coals. There should be a huge pile of red hot coals, so hot that hovering a hand above the coals for three seconds is pushing it. The castie is carried by two people to the grill and a second castie is reverently placed on top. The pilot builds a fire on top of the pans and uses a bamboo blow stick to get small flames licking hungrily upward.

If the first pie is of the Death to All Vegans variety, it could include Hot n’ Spicy Spam, salami, venison sausage brought by a Texan tourist, and the valley’s own free-range organic goat. This carnivorous monstrosity is loaded down with Colby Jack and cheddar cheeses, mushrooms, garlic, onions, pineapple, and Thai sweet chili sauce.

If it is a Veggie Resurrection pizza you will spread a rosemary and basil crust with sauce, adding noni leaves, cheese, mushrooms, onions, garlic, more cheese, olives, green curry and chili sauce. Garnish with toasted coconut, pinenuts, and almonds. A pound of cheese goes on every spiritual pizza, so the Swiss guy who showed up with seven pounds of cheese is especially welcome tonight.

You will suffer a Lent-like eternity of cooking, then cooling, until salvation is in your hands. Musicians play flutes and didgeridoos made of Kalalau bamboo along with ukeleles, guitars, drums, and harmonicas. The jam distracts from the heavenly scent of pizza in the air. After about 40 minutes, or the fourth time someone brings up the hopeful notion that the pizza is done, the pizza pilot scrapes off the fire and lifts up the top pan. This is known as "getting a visual" and is crucial to the success of spiritual pizza. Often delaying gratification until the cheese has reached the proper shade of bubbly brown is necessary.

Good things come to those who wait, and the pizza pilot must not be tempted to pull it off too soon. Once it is off the fire the congregation lets out a sigh of relief. The pizza is placed on a rack on the table and all eyes admire the feast while all mouths water in anticipation.

Preventing the feral cats from attacking the pizza is one reason to watch it. The other is that, without TV or electricity, this is the high point of the evening. After 20 minutes the pilot does a head count and cuts the pizza. On nights when there are 30 people drooling over this pie, the fair solution is to partner up and share. Making Death to All Vegans pizza cuts the number of spectators in half. If you don’t look at spam at any light brighter than campfire, it’s actually quite tasty.

When you bite into your first piece you will become a believer. A long cherished notion that New York is the center of the pizza universe crumbles. Quite literally, it is love at first bite.

Reality intrudes on a Pacific Interlude, Part III: To fully appreciate the intrinsic spirituality of the pizza, lie back among the rocks and watch the cosmos whirl above. Let the trinity of food, friends, and fire awaken your senses and warm your soul. Food for thought: if living with no electricity or buildings among the ruins of an ancient culture fails to sway you, what will? The abundance of natural beauty, perhaps? Rainbows, whales, and shooting stars leave you cold? Ask yourself this: how well did I eat last time I went camping? Then go back and grab another slice of heaven with dessert stuffed crust.