Branded Content & My Lovelife

Story by Justin “Scrappers” Morrison // @scrappers

Photos by Sera Lindsey // @witchs.sabbath

The captain of the catamaran greeted us with his tanlineless penis hanging between his legs. It seemed to say, “Ahoy, Mateys!” Sera and I looked at each other with agreeing smirks. Then we took our clothes off and jumped into the shark-infested water. This is the real-life side of a fake adventure story, the part I should leave out.

The week before I met the naked captain, I politely sat at a meeting table in the headquarters of the shoe company Keen. Nodding my head and saying, ”Yeah, totally! We can make it look like we’re just fans of Keen out on an epic hike.” We were hired to keep it #authentic and #quirky. I was shown photo examples of what that looked like exactly and it was white people with their arms and fingers stretched up in the air like the world was hugging them with entitlement. Pretty much the same stuff brands always ask me and Sera for and never what they get from us in the end. 

I tried to give them what they asked for like a typical YouTuber: “Hey Guys, OMG! We’re here on a boat anchored off the island of Maui. The captain just told us about an orgy he had in the bed we’re sleeping in tonight. Hope he washed the sheets?! Not sure if he’s flirting with both of us or just Sera. Either way, I really want to get off this boat, but it’s the only available place to stay tonight. Maui has a housing shortage because of tourists like us wanting to stay in homes more than hotels. I just asked the captain if we could go to shore and now he’s swimming around the boat naked scrubbing algae off the side. Guess I’m trapped here. Anyways, check out these hiking boots. V-kewl-AF! Right? Oh, don’t forget to subscribe to this channel.” It was clear that the fake content we came to make was far less interesting than the true story.

Dripping wet, the captain told us about his dream to turn this ship into a sort of underwater tree fort. He wants to capsize a couple ships, sink them, anchor them to the ocean floor, and pump oxygen into them from the main boat to create underwater hangouts. He’s a crazy dreamer. He refers to himself as a submariner. I don’t believe a word he says, but I love him.

At night the stars kept us awake while the captain slept. The sky was teeming with life. I’d never seen that many twinklers, shooters, and UFOs. We laid out on a net that ran from one side of the catamaran to the other over the water. The boat rocked like a baby’s cradle. The sky above and the water below seemed to merge together and we floated in the Universe, high on love for the moment.

Sera and I hadn’t stayed up that late since we first met in Cuba two years ago. We were working on another story for a shoe company. She was photographing/modeling and I was writing/producing. I rented a huge five-bedroom mansion for the five-person crew, but it ended up only having four bedrooms. I slept on the firm living room couch which was stuffed with actual sawdust. Sera ended up with the master bedroom and invited me to share the mammoth bed with her. After the third night on the couch, I took her up on the offer. By that point in the trip, the crew felt more like friends anyways, so it didn’t seem flirty at all. To create distance in the bed I warned her that I fart in my sleep. This made her laugh and only brought us closer. We stayed awake in the dark learning about each other in whispers. I like to say we met in the dark. I imagined a future together where I would write and she would shoot photos for adventure stories. Since Cuba, that’s pretty much what we’ve been doing.

The sun came up slowly on the western side of Maui. The water was smooth, glassy, and pastel. The calm was shattered by a humpback whale coming up for a breath of air a couple yards from the boat. The sound caused me to spit my tea out. Sera gasped for breath and used her phone to film the whale. I turned my back from the special moment and scrambled for the nicer camera. I thought, “What if Keen needs high res for billboards?” But by the time I got back with the camera, the moment had passed. Maybe I was mad because I missed it, but I turned my frustration on Sera and that she didn’t use the nicer camera.

Sera and I struggle a lot on these types of adventures. The balance of being together romantically, yet being there to create commercially-valuable content, creates a lot of tension. We often fight in exotic locations. I’ve yelled nasty things at her like, “Do you know how many photographers would find this job FUCKING DELIGHTFUL!” Then she’ll yell something to brutally injure my ego. There is no winning in these fights. We are the trouble in paradise.

The captain woke up after the whale rocked the boat and offered us coconut syrup-smothered banana pancakes. I would rather he give us a ride to shore in his dingy. We have work to do, but I could tell Sera would rather I friggen relax and just accept the moment. His pancakes are pure cane sugar candy. They’re so sticky we have to skinny dip to rinse before going ashore.

The hiking boots Keen wanted photos of are ideal for wet and/or dry conditions, so we’re here to test them on a hike into the schizophrenic weather of Maui’s Haleakalā crater. It can switch from freezing rain to sultry heat by the time you get your rain jacket out of the backpack. Haleakalā is sacred and should not be the backdrop for shoe ads. I know this because I’ve had this conversation with native friends who live on this island. Haleakalā is a place of worship, a place to reconnect with Gods, but I lost sight of that while trying to get a colorful adventure story funded. I am a classic colonizer, but I have a conscience. This shoot feels very wrong: like bubblegum pops echoing in a silent meditation, like squeezing an armpit fart in a mosque, or like taking selfies with strangers’ tombstones. 

Sera’s boots don’t fit. Shoes on these adventures rarely fit because they are sample sizes sent from the factory in China, Thailand, or some other part of the planet that doesn’t have strict laws in place to protect the environment and people who make them. These hiking boots don’t fit her ethics—even worse then they don’t fit her feet. Yet she keeps her cool and descends into the crater while sweat and blisters fill her socks.

I hoped we would make it to the bottom of the crater and would wander around the cinder cones like astronauts on Mars. I even pitched this story to Keen as a Hike on Mars. Our tight boots don’t get us all the way into the crater. We sit down among the orange lava rock gravel to have a trail mix and local mango lunch. Sera talks about her love for the word melon-baller. It reminds me of my love for the word butthole. Two words bounced into one word then become something so familiar yet alien; mellonballerbutthole. None of these words should be spoken in this sacred silent crater. 

Haleakalā translates to the house of the sun. It’s the mountain top that the Hawaiian demigod Maui caught the sun with his mighty hook. He caught the sun to slow it down so people would have longer days. This day is long indeed. I’m not sure if we will make it back out of the crater before dark, but we do. By the time we make it down the mountain, through traffic, and meet up with the captain, the dark has caught us.

Stepping off dry land, into the dingy, and into the black glistening water, I remember a scary story about this cove. It was a night just like tonight. The moon was freaky, the air was warm, and a woman ran into the water the way lovers slam their juicy bodies together. She swam out to a school of dolphins playing out in the reef. She didn’t know dolphins sleep at night. The feeding frenzy of sharks shifted their attention from the turtle dinner to her. It was horrible and it happened right here.

With every wave, the dingy flirts with a capsize. I considered the Hawaiian shark god Ka-moho-aliʻi. He must have heard from the other gods at Haleakalā that we said mellonballerbutthole in the crater. We brought our haole boots to stomp around on sacred Earth. We do not deserve to be on this island. I’m ready to pay for my crimes. I accept my fate. I am going to be eaten alive by a shark.

Even as I write from the picnic table in my dining room in Portland, Oregon, I just know the sharks are circling. They are going to end me faster and more abruptly than I end this story. Maybe the sharks will come in the form of a lawsuit from Keen? Surely I’ve been half as disrespectful to that business as I have to Maui by simply writing my truth. The difference is though, bad press is still press, and press is advertising. Tonight, your dreaming brain might think of Keen and Maui and subconsciously you will connect with the brand and be more likely to buy their hiking boots.

Maybe this story will brainwash you into buying boots, but what I really want your brain to remember is that we used Maui as a backdrop to help the rich get richer. Right now native people are getting arrested on the big island of Hawai’i on Mauna Kea because they are protesting the use and abuse of their sacred land. We need to respect Hawai’i and its people. This is their home, not an exotic location to colonize with our own dreams of making cool ad-like content.

When I create branded content I’m diving into sharky waters. I agreed to make this story happen in less than a week while I also produced three other adventure stories for Keen with a small budget and even smaller timeline. Once the trips ended and we were all back at our computers, the photos and videos delivered to Keen were not #authentic or #quirky enough. They asked for a 50 percent discount. I begged to retain 75 percent to cover the cost of making these stories. The sharks sank their teeth in and I barely made it out of the water alive.

In the following weeks, the naked captain texted me photos of broken ships he just bought and was going to turn into underwater hideouts. I’d like to stay in those sunken ships when they’re ready. Maybe stay up all night talking with Sera. Getting to know her in the dark again. Without any shoes.