THE most remarkable thing occurred a few weeks ago, and it took me this long to make sense of it so I could share it with you, dear reader. I don’t blame you one bit if you don’t believe the story because, to be honest, I would not believe it myself if I had not experienced it firsthand.
I was sitting in my favorite coffee shop in Kona, home to the best coffee in the world, when a funeral procession passed by. It looked like every other funeral procession, a long line of cars with their headlights on, passing through intersections oblivious of the lights and other drivers for some reason I have never understood. I guess it offends the deceased if the family is broken up in traffic. It looked like every other procession, except for one, grotesque detail.
Instead of a hearse to carry the body, this fleet of vehicles was led by not one, not two, but three large cargo trucks. “My goodness!” I thought to myself. “How large was this man?” I had to learn more.
Gulping down the rest of my coffee, an offense my throat punished me for the rest of the day, I chased after the funeral and met them at the graveyard. Mentally separating family from friends, I chose the person calculated the most likely to provide some answers and least likely to be offended by my presence.
“Had you known the deceased long?” I asked in the most innocent voice I could muster.
“Yes, I worked with Jeb at the tuna factory for the last twelve years. It’s just terrible.”
“Yes, it was terrible.” I pretended to know what he meant. “I would love to hear the tragic chain of events from your perspective.” I mainly yearned to know what was in those three trucks and hoped my unwitting informant would get to that in his story.
“As you know, he worked on the tuna line. Oh, it all happened so fast! One minute he was standing over the grinder, loading tuna meat into the hopper that grinds it up and put it in the little cans. The next minute, he was gone. We looked everywhere for him. We thought he went to the bathroom, then we thought he went on break, then we figured he quit his job and went home. Eventually, although no one wanted to believe it, we had to face the fact that maybe he fell into the grinder.”
“My heavens!” I exclaimed. “Say it isn’t so! What a horrible way to die.”
“I know, I know. It was the last thing we considered, so while we searched for him the line kept running. Maybe if we would have thought of it sooner, we may have saved him, but it must have been an hour or more before we turned off the machinery, and by then he was long gone.”
I told him that is just about the most awful thing I have ever heard. But I could not take the suspense any longer. “So that explains the funeral, but what is with the three cargo trucks? I have never seen such an unusual funeral.”
“Well, we knew Jeb had been ground up and distributed among the whole batch of tuna that day, little bits of him scattered among thousands of cans of tuna. None of us had the stomach to open the cans and piece him back together. In the end, the family decided to purchase the whole day’s production and just bury the lot of it.”
Just then, a group of men dressed in coveralls and pushing dollies began lowering cases of tuna into the enormous hole at the cemetery. I don’t blame you if you don’t believe me.
Dr. BC Cook taught history for 30 years and is a director and Pacific historian at Sealark Exploration (sealarkexploration.org). He currently lives in Hawaii.
