Another one of Jake's team challenges: Puzzles and Poetry.

Too many times to count, Jake and I have been asked why we started this crazy thing all those years ago. We’ve honed our response along the way, mindful that when we speak about our work, we speak for a team whose members are as awesome as they are diverse—I’m talking farmers and fishermen, chefs and conservationists, athletes, mathletes, bird-watchers, bird-hunters, and everything in between.

So we go wide. “For the health of people and place,” we say.

But I’m guessing that if you asked each person on our team, one by one, you would get a constellation of answers. More than fifty points of light, each one singular, shining, but all wheeling together toward the same horizon.

For me, the visions I hold for our work are all green.

The green of leaf, and branch, and tree. The green of dense understories, of unbroken native canopies running for miles. (A bird-watcher slowly raises her hand.)

I have tried to make myself a student of native flora. What I lack in technical education, I hope I make up for in constant awe. And when Jake wanted a way to celebrate tiers of team member impact, I was like—native trees. NATIVE TREES!

And so, for years now, team members have earned a 2.5” patch at every milestone in deer harvested, processed, shipped and shared during their time with us, each one embroidered with a native tree species. The first, a little lime-green square, reads “1,000,” flanked by the heart-shaped leaves and twisted seedpods of the Wiliwili, Erythrina sandwicensis.

We picked Wiliwili for its importance in Honuaʻula, the area in which we work and are based. Its gnarled trunks, some of them 300 years old, dot the district’s remnant dryland forests, bent, always, with the wind. One fine specimen grows right off our office porch.

We also chose Wiliwili to go first because, of all the native trees that grow here, it shoots up the fastest in its first year (six feet!), faster even than our famed Koa.

When a team member’s impact doubles, they move on to Koa, and then Māmane, ʻŌhiʻa, ʻIliahi, Kauwila, ʻIeʻie, Mēhamehame! A line of green patches across a work vest: the slow growth of future forests. And good ol’ team brainwashing every step of the way.

Patches on a vest are one thing, but this past spring Jake took the brainwashing even further. Still glowing with the self-proclaimed success of his mandatory Christmas caroling, he unveiled a new team challenge. Puzzles and Poetry.

Projected outcomes were twofold: get more familiar with our impact species, and get better at the thing most of our team fears more than losing a sock—public speaking.

The rules: split into six teams, each assigned to a jigsaw puzzle of one of our native trees. Solve the puzzle and earn a stack of poems, rhyming couplets we packed with factoids and more than a little pidgin. Each team member memorizes one, verbatim, then gets in line to recite it on a mic while everyone around them mutters their own poems on photosynthesis and phyllodes, trying not to forget. One mistake and it’s back of the line. First team to get all their poems recited correctly, wins.

Our recap of Puzzles and Poetry got buried by all the March storms, so we went back and pulled together a video of all the shenanigans for you.

We had way too much fun watching the crew deliver lines like “ʻŌhiʻa! You amaze us, you water conservation genius, YOU!” But silly poems and hard-earned plant patches come from the same place: a love of place. A love of what makes this place so rarefied, so good.

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Now imagine how I felt, tree-hugger that I am, when Jake turned to me a month ago and said, “Hey, guess what we’ve been seeing for the first time ever in ʻUlupalakua, like ever in all our years of work?”

“What?!”

“Wiliwili seedlings.”

(The bird-watcher starts to cry.)

The green of regeneration.

It took two things at once: all-time low deer densities in certain harvest areas, and months of good rain. The same grass that hid deer from us all spring is now hiding seedlings from deer—the first Wiliwili babies to stand a chance in all our years here.

It took more than two things. It took a whole team, a whole pile of patches. It took every one of our singular, shining reasons for sticking with this work, all wheeling toward that horizon.

It took our partners, our community.

You.

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Back in the spring, at the mic, Keahi, one of our Harvest Managers, starts his poem for a third time. "Six feet in one year," he recites, then pauses, then carefully continues, "…how Wiliwili grows with speed!” Another pause. “Then makes you wait another five for a single, tiny seed."

And we keep going. Sometimes to the back of the line. Always, again.

Green and greener still.

The Wiliwili outside our office, in full bloom.