This is Not California

Above: False hope, the Blue Line station at California Avenue.

For five winters, now, I have stared through blurry train windows at gray, dreary, Midwestern bleak. I have watched dark tunnels shift to dark skies and skeleton trees and wisps of the lake's make-believe snow, numbing myself with the racket of city voices and train clatter as I fell into stop after stop: Division, Damen, Western.

And then the vanilla train man's voice whispers, "This is California." My stop, and my dull mind drifts briefly to other places. Bright sun, warm beaches, blue Pacific waves. I smile as I move to the doors that open on the right at California, thinking of palm trees and rolling, sun-soaked hills. I step from the train, and cold Chicago air smacks some remnant of sense back into me.

The air stings. The hairs in my nose freeze. This is not California.

Burnt Bridges

Above: An old shot from Thanksgiving weekend, 2007, of a barge pushing up the Ohio River just above Markland Dam, where Robin's parents live.

While walking in the cold winter air today among young people with bright futures, I was reminded for absolutely no reason of a moment well over a decade ago.

In that remembered moment, I, too, had been young, though not so young that my future glowed as brightly as it had before. I looked around me and saw closing doors. Untrodden paths had begun to vanish, and the course of my life seemed to grow more fixed with each passing day. I walked along the riverfront in my small Kentucky town, watched a passing barge, and thought, "That path is closed. Now I can say with complete assurance that I'll never drive a barge up the Ohio River." I ignored the melancholy yearning every river town boy nurses at the back of his mind and let that option fade forever away.

Some time later, a few years into my gig writing feature articles for the local paper, I wrote a series of stories about night shift workers--an emergency room nurse, a sheriffs deputy, a toll booth operator. On a lark, I added a river barge pilot and arranged a midnight interview aboard a harbor tug at the Owensboro river port. I drove to a dock in the cold winter dark with a bitter photographer, and together we climbed aboard a pretty white tug with a blue stripe down the side.

We spent an hour or more talking about river life as the pilot moved barges from one piling to another. And then a path once closed opened up for me. The pilot, a mischievous man who had spent most of his adult life chain smoking as he worked alone in dark wheelhouses, smiled, walked away from the rudder, and said, "Want to give it a try? It's easy. Just point it where you want it to go, and there you go." And so it was that for about 15 minutes, I drove an Ohio River tug pushing a single hundred-foot barge a little more than a mile up the river.

The moral of this tale should be clear, but I'll spell it out anyway: driving a river barge is really, really cool.

2010: The Year I Make Contact (Ramblings)

Above: A piece of art stolen long ago from a forgotten source. Should the source find this, I'll gladly credit you, or take it down. Your pick.

In childhood, like many people my exact age, I saw the future embodied in a single year featured in a movie made a half-decade before my birth. When I imagined the future, I imagined a silent space ship launched ten years after my high school graduation, manned by two lonely humans and a confused computer from Illinois, rising from Earth toward Jupiter and an unexpected eternity beyond. All my dreaming, all my calculations stopped there at that single year, 2001. I couldn't imagine anything beyond that.

Now that future is nearly a decade in the past, though nobody, neither man nor machine, has gone to Jupiter just yet. The future came with little more fanfare than a few exploding planes, then passed on to something far more boring than movie folk imagined. A war or two. An economic failure. A space ship shattering in the rising dawn over Texas at the exact moment I saw my own life burst into pieces and fall to Earth in flame.

But movie folk and overrated science fiction writers who know nothing of characterization know that no future is the final chapter. (At least not until the end of time, and who's ready to write that story?) There's always something more to wring from a tale, so they wrote a sequel. The year we make contact. The year we now fall into with a minimum of fanfare, as if we have nothing better to do than plod on into a future that doesn't come close to anything we imagined, anything hoped for or dreamed. This is simply where we are, because we haven't anyplace else to be.

I doubt the past decade was any better for me than anyone else, and I really doubt it was any worse. The important point is that it's over. We've hit the number. We've reached the sequel, the moment in the saga where everything changes. And the moment of that film that sticks in my my mind as we leave the future farther and farther behind is a message spoken by gods through a machine: All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landings there.

You know, I'm fine with letting the gods have Europa. Who needs one moon, or even one planet full of stupid little problems, when we have a future full of worlds to explore?

Happy new year, my friends. Happy new decade. Happy new world.

Philosophizing-Imagining Google World

Above: Robin visits her Earthly paradise, the realm of the mothership in Redmond, Washington, 2006.

We spent the recent Thanksgiving holiday in Colorado, where, among other things, we had dinner with our old friend, Taylor, and our much newer friend, Marc. Marc and Taylor are computer people, remnants of the boom before last when new economy empires built on intangible pieces of the wire scattered themselves over dry patches of prairie in digital office parks formed with SimCity geometric precision. Taylor has managed to scrape his way through the last decade's technological holocaust almost completely unscathed. He is among the last of the Foosball generation of American workers. He is the last of the tech guys still getting paid largely for doing nothing ... though he works a job in which the phrase "take New York offline" actually has meaning.

As such, Taylor tends to be an early adopter of new technological wonders. He typically uses lots of make-believe words whenever I see him, though I've learned to at least attempt to pay attention, because I know these are words that will be plastered all over the media within the next six months. I'm fairly sure this is how I learned about Twitter, for instance, or Facebook, or MySpace, or the wheel, or any number of fancy wire hoosee-watsits before that. When the Singularity comes, I'm pretty sure I'll hear about it from Taylor.

The buzz this time, though, was more mundane. The catchphrase was, "Google," a word I already know. It seems Google is revolutionizing email. And social networking. And breathing. And the gravitational constant of the universe. Google is taking over everything, it seems, absorbing our brains into itself and recreating them with little targeted pop-up ads designed to get us to buy things that aren't worth anything. We all are Google, now, and Google is us.

Taylor talked about all this with that glazed look he gets when talking about the latest new world order, but there also was a certain fear. Google, it seemed, had gone too far. It's become the new evil empire. Google had intertwined itself into our existence so deeply that now it had become a threat to our very way of life.

This isn't something unusual. Google is only the latest in a long line of digital threats to our souls. Before Google, it was Steve Jobs with his spirit-crushing iThings that swallowed culture and stored it in pretty little boxes. And before that, of course, there was Bill Gates, our bespectacled overlord. This has all happened before, and it will happen again. And it's never really turned out the way the fearful thought it would. Nobody managed to take over the world, except maybe Wal-Mart, and they did it not with computer chips but with cheap sweat pants made out of Chinese lead.

This got me to thinking, though, about the difference between Gates and Jobs and Google, and made me wonder if maybe Google had a better shot at world domination than its predecessors. The difference with Microsoft, after all, was the existence of Bill Gates himself. The difference with iWorld was that you had Steve Jobs. In the case of both empires, you had a physical entity to take the form of world leader pretend. You had a specific image for Big Brother, a name known even by the Luddites like me.

But who do you have for Google? I mean, I know Google had its inventors, and I know these guys have names, but they've never been at the forefront of their empire. Google is not a face or a name. It's a search engine and a logo in primary colors with cute little cartoons. So where will the general public direct their backlash? How will the Luddites lash out against cute little cartoons? How can we fight an empire with a misspelled name that sounds like "noodle" or "strudel" or "bugle"?

I think Google may already own us. I think we already may have fallen. But I'll just step away from the machine for a while and think about that. Maybe I'll just take comfort in the pages of my life I've laid out here on this site. At least I know Google can't touch any of that.

Postscript: Endorsements

Above: Our handy guide book, which only steered us wrong that one time.

Two more things.

First, for anyone wanting to create a Hawaiian adventure of their very own, I highly recommend the travel guide we used, Hawaii: The Big Island Revealed, from Wizard Publications. The book is written, photographed, and published completely by people who live on the islands and know the way the islands really work. It's full of beautiful pictures, handy maps, and nifty little factoids, along with a wealth of insider information not every tourist can get. (Most other guidebooks are circumspect about how to access Champagne Pond, for instance, probably because they don't want to work out the private ownership issues.) The book's only failing was a lack of clarity in its directions to the Green Sand Beach, but I'll forgive that. In addition to the Big Island, the company also publishes books on Maui, O'ahu, and Kaua'i.

Second, while I hope somebody out there in the digital realm got some enjoyment out of this exercise in self-indulgence, my reasons for devoting so much time to this go beyond my urge to make sensitive Canadians mad. I do this mainly so that when I'm old and senile, I can look back over the highlights of my life and know I went somewhere and saw something. I am not at all confident in the permanence of anything on the wire, though. I highly doubt this site will exist in fifty years. I use it, then, as the format for my rough draft. Now that I'm done writing this thing, I'll take all these words and pictures and put them in a real, honest-to-God, hard copy dead tree book.

Example, The cover to my Alaska book:

I do this using Blurb, a nifty little publishing company that lets non-publishers put together any book they please on a program downloaded free of charge. The program is a bit buggy, but fairly easy to use. There are design templates for people without any graphic design experience. (I'd actually advise real designers to stay away, as it will drive them nuts.) You can order as many copies of your book as you want, and though the books themselves are a little expensive, they're of high quality and look like professionally produced travel books. For me, it's a good answer to the photo album in the digital age.

All Things Go, All Things Go

Above: An old shot looking down the Blue Line from the California stop.

Some ungodly hour Sunday Morning, September 6, 2009

There is this somewhat politically incorrect yet still real phenomenon in Chicago I call the Ukranian Shift Change. The city is home to an inordinate number of Ukranian immigrants, all of whom, it seems, work in third-shift janitorial positions in skycrapers, government buildings, and airport terminals. Twice a day, at the start of third shift and again at the end, thousands of enthusiastic Ukranians stuff the el trains and yell at each other across great distances. Unwieldy Ukranian words I couldn't begin to pronounce bang loudly against train car walls over the racket of wheels on rails.

We happened to come into Chicago at the end of the shift for O'Hare's Ukranians, after having passed a night shortened by five hours in the air. We were tired, and on top of that, we were bitter and depressed. We'd spent a week in paradise and were in no mood for Chicago noise. We boarded the Blue Line train at O'Hare and were fortunate to get a seat at 5 a.m. Ukranians yelled past us. We stared at the dreary Kennedy Expressway out the window.

I worked it out in my mind, though. Ukranians have been gentrified and white-flighted out of the city, so that they live no closer than Jefferson Park. We'd only have to listen to the shift change for a few stops. But what then? There'd still be el train rumble. There'd still be the roar of motorcycles blasting up Fullerton. There'd still be the boom of fireworks leftover from the Independence Days of various nations going off at random intervals. Expressway rush. Garbage truck bang. Never ending population grumble. Snarl. Growl.

We walked home from the California Avenue station through dawn racket, wanting to sleep but knowing better. We slipped under the familiar covers anyway, listening to a barking dog next door. But in my mind, I heard coqui frogs. I heard Pacific waves and wind.

And that does it. Tune in next year for our further adventures in medicine and travel.

Day 9-Going Home

Above: A Hawaiian Air flight lands at Honolulu.

Saturday, September 5, 2009

We left Hawai'i much the way we arrived: in rain. Clouds hid our last sunrise just as they hid our first, and we didn't bother with breakfast or porch. Rain dripped as we stood one last time on our lava cliff, wacthed just a few more waves, then locked the door of our borrowed home and bounced our way toward the airport. We surrendered the Jeep--having racked up 1,700 miles on a hundred-mile island-- and I smuggled my two lava rocks past bored Homeland Security types and sat in Hilo's open air terminal.

And so, back into airline world, with all its frantic waiting. I kept my face to the plane window as we left, watching the Mauna Kea telescopes above the clouds and the Waipi'o Valley below them and the coast of North Kohala out past them. And I stared at it all again from a distance after we passed through Honolulu. I watched the mass of clouds gathered on the island's windward side until they fell below the distant horizon.

And then empty sea. An hour later, I saw a tiny cruise ship eight miles below me, headed west with the trade winds toward Maui or Oahu. And somewhere after that, we left the trade winds behind. We fell back into weather patterns we knew.

Pictures:

A few final shots of house I couldn't find a place to use elsewhere but didn't want to leave out. This little sculpture was in the middle of our parking area in front of our house.

A last shot of cliff.

Okay ... so one more.

Mad Robin reflects both our moods as we leave Hawai'i through the Hilo airport.

The main concourse of the Hilo airport.

Our plane back to Honolulu.

Mauna Kea as we leave.

Both Mauna Loa on the left and Mauna Kea on the right.

A Japan Air flight at the Honolulu airport.

The Honolulu airport is clever.

While waiting at Honolulu, I noticed all the inter-island flights heading south were delayed. We hadn't passed through any significant weather. I couldn't work out a reason.

Looking toward the Waikiki condo mess and Diamond Head from the Honolulu airport.

I like the paint scheme on Hawaiian Air planes.

Looking from the airport toward Oahu's Koolau Range, mountains much lower and much older than those on the Big Island.

A Hawaiian Air plane.

Closer.

I shot this purely by accident out the airplane window as we taxied. I meant to get the fire, and the little plane just happened to pass into view.

Leaving, looking south toward the island of Moloka'i.

And past Moloka'i toward other islands. You can see a bulge of Lana'i past Moloka'i at right and Maui at left.

A good view of Moloka'i's Kalaupaoa Peninsula. I don't know anything about the Kalaupaoa Peninsula. You also get a good view in this shot of the way land gathers clouds, and how even Moloka'i's fairly low mountains are enough to block the rains.

The Big Island in the distance.

My last view of Mauna Kea, poking above clouds at least 150 miles away at this point. Just in case, I waved at the guys looking through telescopes.

The sun fell below the horizon about five hours into the flight, and hour or so out of Los Angeles. The world turned dark in the light of the full moon.

A jumbo jet at Los Angeles bound for New Zealand.

Looking from the terminal toward the international terminal, with the Theme Building poking just above.

Los Angeles mayor love.

Day 8, Part 3-My God! It's Full of Stars!

Above: Though it's hard to tell in this shot, this is the bright full moon shining on the sea of clouds below us, as seen from Mauna Kea Visitor Information Station, 9,300 feet up the side of Mauna Kea. I can't begin to capture how awesome this was to see in person.

Friday, September 4, 2009

Perhaps the coolest thing about Hawai'i is that it is possible in the space of an hour to climb from warm and sunny tropical beach to cold lichen-covered alpine rock. You can, if you feel like breaking your car rental agreement, drive from sea level at Kamehameha Drive and reach 6,000 feet a mere 28 miles west down the Saddle Road. A right turn and another 10 miles along a well-maintained dirt road will add another 7,000 feet to your climb. You top out at the 13,796-foot summit of Mauna Kea, the tallest mountain on the planet and second-tallest mountain on any planet orbiting the sun, when measured from its base at the bottom of the Pacific.

We were out of time, though, so we didn't follow the stream of traffic to the top to watch the sunset from the parking lot of the Mauna Kea observatories. We decided instead to spend our last evening on the island at 9,300 feet, standing in the cold air outside the Onizuka Visitor Information Station, sipping hot chocolate, and looking at stars.

Every night, astronomers and local volunteers set up fancy telescopes outside the station and take advantage of the clearest skies on the planet to look at the universe around us. There were about ten telescopes aimed at various objects when we were there, and we gazed through the fading light of dusk at distant stars and nebulae. I saw the blue-white glow of Vega through one scope. Another looked at a star cluster I didn't know. A third, the largest on site, looked at the bright point of Jupiter I'd been staring at all week. Through the scope, though, Jupiter's point became a marble-sized disk, with the bands of clouds I'd only ever seen in pictures clearly visible. I gasped at the sight, more because of the four bright points floating in a straight line to either side of the planet. These were the Galilean moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, home in my science fiction universe of the Jovian Empire. And in the real universe, one of these points might even now carry ice-covered oceans of life.

Around 8, we gathered with fellow visitors in a circle around an astronomer for his nightly talk, though our bad timing limited the show. The Southern Cross, visible from Hawai'i and no place else in the United States, had gone in for the year. The full moon, on the other hand, had come out, and its light hid the smokey haze of Milky Way and the mass of dimmer stars we might have seen. But even so, it was a spectacular show. The learned astronomer pointed out the major stars I'd seen countless times before, though they hovered much lower in the sky than where I usually found them. Polaris, the north star, floated just above the ridge of Mauna Kea. Half the Big Dipper rose above the ridge to the left of Polaris. Arcturis hovered almost due west, and I learned that this was Hawai'i's zenith star, the star that passed almost directly overhead of the island. Ancient mariners used this star to tell them when they reached Hawai'i's latitude. A short distance to the left of Arcturis was Spica, which served the same navigational purpose for Tahiti.

A kid, maybe eight or nine, watched this show with us, and when the time came, he asked question after question that I might have asked at his age, questions about the speed of light and the nature of black holes and what might happen when the sun went out. The astronomer explained the life cycle of the sun, how someday the sun's hydrogen would burn out, and the sun would expand and swallow the Earth in atomic fire. The kid's eyes widened for a moment, and Robin added, "But not for a long, long time." I smiled, looked at the stars gathered around distant Mauna Loa on the southern horizon, on the other side of a sea of cloud.

Pictures:

The Saddle Road, which leaves Hilo in a southwesterly direction and climbs the wide saddle between Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa.

Clouds almost always clump over the eastern length of the Saddle Road as trade winds push them again the flank of the two mountains. It always rains here.

Above the clouds, we move back into Hawai'i's arid zone. Vegetation changes over to a mix of desert plants and high-altitude lichen and moss. Hawai'i climatologists are probably very schizophrenic people.

Some type of small, high-altitude flower growing along the Saddle Road above 5,000 feet.

The Saddle Road swings randomly right and left for much of its length, a vestige of history. Built at rapid-fire pace in the days--and I mean “days” literally--after Pearl Harbor to allow easy access the Pohakuloa Training Area and army airfield, the Saddle Road offers an alternate connection between Hilo and Waimea. It climbs straight up the mountainside and crosses the wide expanse of plain that stretches between Mauna Loa and Muana Kea. More than any other road on the island, though, the Saddle Road ignores topography. It wanders aimlessly right and left in swooping curves designed more to slow the advance of possible invaders than to facilitate tourist travel. It tops out around 6,000 feet above sea level some 20 miles outside Hilo, then falls back toward Waimea and the Kona side. The monster curves and constant rain of the road’s windward lengths inspire its frequent placement on lists of the state’s most dangerous highways …which is why many car rental agreements (including ours) mark the road off-limits. It’s a cool road, though, so most of these agreements are ignored.

Our Jeep alongside a recently rebuilt segment of Saddle Road. After decades of ignoring the road's existence, the state has in the last ten years been modernizing the highway a piece at a time.

Looking south from Saddle Road near its crest, toward the bulk of Mauna Loa.

Saddle Road swerves toward its western flank, preparing to drop back toward Waimea.

Extinct cinder cones visible from the Saddle Road. Hawai'i is full of extinct cinder cones. Anytime you see a hill, you can be 90% sure it's an extinct cinder cone.

Looking down toward the saddle as we climb the slope of Mauna Kea.

A plaque outside the Onizuka Visitor Information Station commemorating Ellison Onizuka. Born in Kona, Ellison Onizuka was the first Hawaiian to go to space. He died aboard the Challenger in 1986.

Looking down from the Visitor Information Station toward the clouds pouring onto the saddle and Mauna Loa beyond.

Looking up the slope of Mauna Kea. There are some nifty hiking trails up there. Next time, I hope to take a few.

One of the telescopes outside the Visitor Information Station.

The Visitor Information Station at night, bathed in red light to allow our eyes to adjust better.

Day 8, Part 2-Hilo

Above: One of the strip of downtown buildings lining Kamehameha Drive, the main drag in downtown Hilo.

Friday, September 4, 2009

It turned into a race, because all things always take longer than they should. Hilo's a small town, but even small towns can have too much traffic on a Friday afternoon. And if you have to get to a dive shop that closes at 4:00, too much traffic is virtually guaranteed. So I veered off the main road going into Hilo, thinking I'd avoid a few stoplights, but traffic on the side roads was just as bad.

We made it to the dive shop on the main strip in downtown Hilo with about 20 minutes to spare, and the grumpy hippie was there waiting for us. He snarled as he noticed us, and his black behemoth of a dog barked a few times, but looked at us as if we were too sour to eat. I smiled twice a big as I normally would and held up the dive bag of snorkel equipment. "We'd like to return this!" I said, trying to make the exclamation point obvious.

The man grunted. "Empty the bag."

"Sure thing!" I gently set the fins and mask on the shop floor. The man leaned over them, looked at it all, grunted again. "Did you have a chance to rinse any of this off? It's still got salt all over it."

I faltered. "Well, no," I said with the regret of an inland guy who lives next to a giant freshwater lake and therefore isn't used to thinking about salt. "I didn't know we were supposed to do that. I'm sorry."

The grumpy hippie stared at me with the expression of a man whose own regret is a life of customer service, then grabbed a big plastic tub. "Put it in there," he said. "There's a hose outside. Wash it off."

I spent the next five minutes washing it off, doing my best to follow the grumpy hippie's direction, smiling all the while mainly because it annoys grumpy people when you smile at them. Eventually, the hippie got tired of the whole thing and cleared us to go. And I figure that when you spend an entire week running all over a place and only come across one grumpy guy, you're doing pretty well ... though I think I'll probably go someplace else for snorkel equipment next time. (Hint to travelers who aren't expert snorkelers: Avoid this place.)

We never really got a chance to explore the town of Hilo itself. This single hour on this afternoon was all the time we'd have, so we strolled down the main street, spent a few minutes exploring the little row of storefront shops looking out over Kamehameha Drive and a tiny strip of palm tree park and the little bypass road and then the bay. The sun shone brightly in a late afternoon blue sky. We stopped at a Hawaiian shave ice place and got two of the best shave ices ever, as you'd expect. We sat on on a little wall by the sidewalk, ate our shave ices, and watched happy tourist people. Every few minutes, an old military prop plane passed close overhead on its way to land at Hilo Airport, and for no reason at all, I felt just like I was in Havana in 1956.

Pictures of Hilo, scattered throughout the week:

The sweeping curve of Highway 130 as it curls toward its intersection with Highway 11 about five miles south of Hilo. In the distance above the trees, you see the bulk of Mauna Kea, visible from this spot only about half the time. It rained here more often than not.

Looking toward Mauna Kea from Highway 11. I think the two giant mountains, Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea, were a large part of why I fell in love with this island. That, and the fact that I like rain.

Coming into Hilo along Kamehameha Drive. Highway 11 dead ends into this drive a few blocks behind us. Downtown Hilo is straight ahead.

A little bypass road swings off Kamehameha just before downtown and runs between a small patch of palm tree park and the bay. People on their way to the Hamakua Coast take this road.

I originally thought this was a light, but looking at it now I'm not so sure. This stands right at the edge of the Wailuku River, which empties into Hilo Bay on the north side of downtown. I snapped this quickly as we zipped by on Highway 19.

There were always these guys in Hilo Bay, standing on surf boards and pushing themselves along with long paddles. I can't begin to imagine how you'd do this.

The official name of this structure standing at the northwest end of downtown Hilo is Bayshore Towers, though it's only one building. Built in 1970 and standing a whopping 135 feet (less than one-tenth the height of the singular Sears Tower), Bayshore Towers is--are?--the tallest building on the big island. Another reason I like the big island. I'm sort of over skyscrapers.

Along the strip of touristy shops in downtown Hilo. The shave ice shop was here, as was Cafe Pesto, where we had that fabulous dinner our first night on the island. (We went back Thursday, and it wasn't as good). You'll also find a number of t-shirt and trinket shops, a really cool almost constant farmers market, a few surf shops, and a maritime museum.

Hilo hippies outside city hall, because you can stop a war at Hilo City Hall. I make fun of hippies, but the thing is, I generally sympathize with the same causes. But hippie-style protest always rubs me the wrong way. It seems designed more for show and self-aggrandizement than for accomplishment. I always have this sneaking suspicion that the hippies didn't arrive at their points of view by way of a thorough examination of the facts. Sometimes, I get the feeling they just think protesting is fun.

The Hilo Public Library, which I include in order to make a point about the misconception of the prevalence and power of technology in American society exemplified by computer people--specifically, Robin. Robin and I had only a couple of verbal scuffles over the course of the trip, the largest of which took place in the Honolulu Airport when we arrived the first day. I won't go into the issues that brought about the verbal scuffle, but tangential to them was an assumption on Robin's part that we would be able to print our boarding passes for our return trip at the Hilo library by accessing their internet. "Did you call to confirm that?" I had asked, and Robin had rolled her eyes, because she was in an eye-rolling mood. "No, I didn't call to confirm," she had snipped, "because there's no reason to confirm whether we can do something you've been able to do at every library in country for the last fifteen years."

And so it was that we left downtown Hilo around 4 Friday afternoon, made our way up the hill to the Hilo library, and discovered that in order to access the internet, you had to have a library card. Robin was aghast. She was indignant as we left the library and marched across the parking lot. "That makes no sense," she said. "That goes against the very concept of a library."

"I thought the concept of a library was to hold books," I said, chuckling to myself and rattling off in my head some rant about the illusory power of technology computer people cling to. I'll admit it. I was smug.

Day 8, Part 1-One Last Time at Sea

Above: Fish

Friday, September 4, 2009

And so we began our last hurrah. We luxuriated in one more leisurely breakfast on the balcony, climbed once more into the Jeep and made our way one last time to the tide pools. We stopped first at Champagne Pond and drifted through the warm, still waters. And then we took one last tour through real ocean at the Kapoho Tide Pools.

Here's the thing: I can't swim, and it's not like I haven't tried. I took formal lessons at least three times as a child. I've tried teaching myself in swimming pools a thousand times since, but none of it ever took. I can kind of float, sometimes, and I can get something like forward motion, but I never figured out how to coordinate that turn-your-head-and-breathe thing. I can flail enough to push myself about twenty feet, and then I drown.

Snorkeling, though, is a different thing altogether. You have fins on your feet, so you can move forward at a pretty good clip with minimal effort. You have that little tube, so you can breathe without having to turn your head. And sure, sometimes the tube fills with water which you frequently inhale, but play around with it for a week, and you'll eventually work out strategies for dealing with that. You work out strategies for dealing with all sorts of stuff, actually, so that by the end of it you almost feel like you're supposed to be there. You almost feel like a natural.

I felt like a natural that last time in the Kapoho Tide Pools. I zipped through the water at will, let myself drift, pointed myself this way and that and actually went where I meant to go. I curved around the rocks, ventured out a little into the big water where the waves swept overhead and the big fish swam, and I didn't panic. I didn't scream into my mask. I enjoyed the play of the waves, the push and pull of the current. I watched the big fish gather in schools that might have stretched from here to California.

Most of the time, though, I spent floating around the protected pools feeling free. I imagined myself floating in air, flying like Superman, or maybe drifting through space. Your ears are under water when you snorkel, so the world is a quiet place. You hear things, sometimes strange things. When Robin snapped a picture and turned the knob to advance the film, for instance, it sounded as if the camera were right next to my head instead of 50 feet across a tide pool. But everything else is silence, the way it is in space. It's easy to feel isolated while snorkeling in a tide pool. It's easy to find solitude.

Though you're never really alone. There always are fish, wondrous fish in all shapes and sizes, and they're more curious than you might expect a fish to be. It's almost as if they wondered why I was there. Some fish, especially a particular brand of rainbow stripped fish, were curious enough to stay with me, and sometimes I almost thought they were playing. I'd reach out, almost thinking I could touch them, and they'd almost let me, then swim off just a few feet away. I'd move toward them again, and then again, and the game went on and on. We swam circles around each other.

And then it was time to go. The dive shop closed at four, and we wanted to clean ourselves and return everything by three, so we left the pool at two. And for the first time ever, I was sad because I had stop swimming.

Pictures, though I can't tell you what anything is:

Corals. You can kind of see the colors here.

Yellow brain corals, in one of the deeper pools.

The purple of this coral really shows up well.

Robin.

A school of long, silver fish. There were a few of these schools that might have had a hundred fish, each about a foot long.

One of my striped rainbow fish friends, though the colors don't really show up here. I believe these are saddleback wrasse. There were a lot of them. Most of them were six or eight inches long.

Day 7, Part 4-Damned Hippies

Above: Some random picture of old hippies off the internet.

Thursday, September 3, 2009

At the risk of oversimplifying an entire population, I believe the people of Hawai'i are the most laid back people on the planet. I can't say anything about the other islands, but with the exception of one hippie, everybody from the big island seemed happy and generally stress-free. They didn't seem to worry over little things. They fixed broken gates with duct tape. They joked around a lot. They all seemed to know each other, and would stop randomly to tell each other funny stories.

The local population of the big island seems to be made up of two demographics, Hawaiians of Polynesian descent, and hippie immigrants from the mainland. The first group seems to take most things in stride. They feel pride in their heritage, and there does seem to be a growing sense of loss and resentment as time passes and ancient Hawai'i slips further away, but those I met looked at the issue with snide amusement. They might have been annoyed by us, but they still seemed welcoming. They smiled and said hello and flashed us "shakas," that little hand wave thing where you stick out your thumb and pinky.

The hippies, from what I could tell, mostly came to the big island in the '60s and '70s because San Francisco was too uptight. These are not the Lexus hippies most mainland boomers grew into once they started voting Republican. These are real deal hippies, hippies who forgot to tune back in after they dropped out, hippies with an attitude that illustrates very well the quality of marijuana grown at that latitude.

We met a woman who combined the two demographics Thursday night in the checkout line at the Hilo Safeway, where we'd stopped to buy a bottle of wine for our nightly balcony lounge. She wore a name tag that I swear said Donna Karan, and she talked with everybody who passed through her line as if she'd known them forever. Her eyes had that distant look eyes get in altered states. She reminded me exactly of Kristin Wiig's Target Lady from Saturday Night Live. I kept expecting her to run off in search of some item her customers had picked up. I expected her to congratulate us when our credit card went through.

Instead, she asked us where we were from, because everybody on the island knew we were from somewhere else. "Illinois," we said. "Oh, wow," she said in her trippy voice through lips that didn't move. "I went to Illinois once. I had a friend who lived in Chesterfield, Illinois, and I went to help her once when she was going through a divorce, and all it was was just farms everywhere, and corn and stuff. I didn't like it."

I nodded, as my opinion of Illinois is roughly similar, and I wouldn't have wanted to debate the topic, anyway. But then she added, "It looked a lot like Idaho."

I've never heard anyone compare Illinois with Idaho. I wondered where she picked up those drugs.

Day 7, Part 3-Lunch and a Garden Walk

Above: Lunch shack food along the old Mamalahoa Highway.

Thursday, September 3, 2009

We swerved again onto a designated scenic segment of the old Mamalahoa Highway on the way back to Hilo. (How the state decides one highway is more "scenic" than another in Hawai'i, I don't know.) We swooped past a small collection of farms, then stopped at What's Shakin', a little yellow lunch shack in the middle of nowhere. Our guidebook said the place had good smoothies, so we ordered a couple along with two fish wraps, settled on the veranda, and enjoyed silence. As always, a soft wind blew through nearby trees, and we could look out and see the blue line of ocean far off down the slope.

We moved on to the Hawai'i Tropical Botanical Garden, a 40-acre tract along the steep slope of Onomea Valley. Started in 1977 when Dan and Pauline Lutkenhouse bought the valley because they thought it was pretty, the garden has transformed from an overgrown mass of jungle--which would be pretty enough in itself--to a beautiful, lush home to 2,000 species of rare plants from all over the world. A tangle of walkways weave through groves of coconut palm and hanging vines and tropical flowers I'd only seen on television. The paths take full advantage of the natural setting, skirting tranquil streams as they tumble over rocks and down waterfalls, then trickle into the ocean at Onomea Bay.

The thing is, neither Robin nor I are really plant people, and I can't tall you now exactly what I saw. All I remember is that it was a quiet place, the next best thing to walking through the jungle.

Pictures:

What's Shakin', a little yellow lunch shack in the middle of nowhere.

The window, where a couple of locals prepare the food. This would be a nice place to work.

Robin's smoothie, made with fresh bananas and mangoes from a neighboring farm.

The visitors center for Hawai'i Tropical Botanical Garden.

Several signs commemorate donors to the garden. I thought this one was hilarious. This woman is remembered only for having love bamboo. And since the sign is made of plastic, she will be remembered this way for thousands of years.

Fortunately, I captured the signs on a lot of these. This is finger palm.

Robin saw these and said, "Those look like cat whiskers." Two seconds later, she turned and saw the sign telling us these were called "cat whiskers."

A grove of coconut palms. All palms actually are new to Hawai'i, having been brought over by Europeans only in the last hundred years.

The stream tumbles over Onomea Falls, then winds through the coconut grove on its way to Onomea Bay.

A glimpse of ocean through the trees.

A couple of large rocks lie just off shore.

Some little purple plant.

Another view of the ocean through the trees.

The garden has a caged enclosure for South American macaws. We happened by as this guy, a garden volunteer and lover of birds, was feeding them and discussing their habits with fellow tourists. The birds obviously claim the guy as their own, though. They grew jealous and kept climbing over him and pecking him gently, vying for his attention.

One of the macaws.

The macaw eats.

The Lilly Lake fish pond. These fish obviously are trained to expect food from visitors. They moved in mass to the wall when we approached. It was kind of creepy.

A giant tiki statue. Immunity, back up for grabs.

Robin and the giant tiki. She has won immunity.

More ocean.

Still more ocean.

Day 7, Part 2-Hamakua Coast to the Waipi'o Valley

Above: Looking into the hermit paradise of the Waipi'o Valley.

Thursday, September 3, 2009

This one was my fault. I wanted to see the Waipi'o Valley, even though it was forty miles away, and I knew we didn't have time to go down into it. Already, I was assembling my list for things to do next time. Our jaunt to the Waipi'o Valley would be reconnaissance for later journeys. I'd take a look from the viewpoint and decide if it were worth coming back a year or two down the line. Because, yeah, we already knew we'd be coming back.

Waipi'o lies at the northern end of the Hamakua coast, another of the big island's six districts. Hamakua is the transition zone between Puna and Kohala, where land is old enough to have been carved into stream basins but not so old as to have been gouged into rugged inaccessibility. The districts gets the rain shoved against both Mauna Kea and Kohala, which pours in pristine torrents down luscious canyons. The highway swerves in and out of these canyons, curling around upon itself before emerging onto long stretches of open plain. It's a beautiful region and fairly well populated, though it has the feel of being on the way to somewhere else.

We left the main highway at Honoka'a, a little tourist trap of a town that reminded me of a tiny version of Estes Park, Colorado, or Jackson, Wyoming. It was a town full of little boomer shops, fancy coffee shops, crystal stores and such. There were cute little cafes next to stores selling the kind of scarves boomers buy in Belize. A small band of U.S. Navy guys from Oahu stood outside a sandwich shop.

Past Honoka'a, the road turns rural for a stretch, then stops suddenly at a parking lot and a guard shack. The road continues past the parking lot and guard shack, and anybody is allowed to go on, provided they have the right kind of vehicle. This is the entrance to the Waipi'o Valley. The road drops 2,000 feet into the valley at a 25% grade, the most severe grade I've seen in my life.

Waipi'o is the other end of the series of valleys we'd seen the day before at Pololu, though it's far more dramatic than its northern counterpart. Waipi'o is considered a special place by the Hawaiian people. At one time, this was the home of kings and the ghosts of kings. The stories say this was where Kamehameha was hidden as a child to protect him from a jealous king who wanted to avoid a prophesy. In recent years, the valley has been ruled by hippies and hermits, a rough assortment of social dropouts who revelled in the valley's isolation, at least until the tourists found it again in the '90s. Today, tour companies drive tourists into the valleys in four-wheel drive vans for a fee. A hiking path crosses the valley and climbs the 2,000-foot cliffs on the opposite side, before dropping into another valley, and another, and another.

Someday, I will hike this path ... but not today. Today, I could only gaze into this version of hermit paradise and imagine myself as one of them, living in a shack and giving tourists the stink eye. We stood for a while at the overlook, watched some high-strung boomer woman complain at length about her companion's inability to properly compose a photograph, watched other tourists look into the valley, but not with the longing I felt. I wanted to be a part of that landscape. And someday, I will be.

Pictures:

The road from Akaka Falls drops down the pali, the high-country that encircles the island.

Honomu Hongwanji Church in Honomu. I find it incredibly difficult to find any information about churches in Hawai'i. Hawaiian churches evidently have yet to discover the internet.

Back on Highway 19, the main road at this point. Highway 19 extends north from Hilo along the Hamakua Coast, then curves inland to Waimea and across the island to Kawaihae on the Kona Coast.

Portions of the old Mamalahoa Highway run parallel to Highway 19 at many points. This was the path of the first cobblestone road to encircle the island, first built by Kamehameha in order to facilitate his invasions. It was the only road through the Hamakua Coast until the tsunami of 1946 destroyed a railroad that Europeans and Americans had built through the region. Instead of rebuilding the railroad, Hawai'i's government built Highway 19.

Pasture land along the old Mamalahoa Highway.

Along the old Mamalahoa Highway, foliage absorbs another vehicle parked too long.

The old highway through the jungle.

The Jeep on the old road.

More views of the old road. I could go on forever.

Looking down the pali, past coconut trees.

Looking from an overlook along Highway 19 down toward Laupahoehoe Point.

Laupahoehoe Point is kind of like an Our Lady of Angels Fire or a Carrollton Bus Crash for Hawaiians. A village stood here until the 1946 tsunami--caused by an earthquake in the Aleutian Islands--swept over the point. The tsunami killed about 160 people on the island, most of whom were in Hilo, but the focus for this tragedy centered on the school at Laupahoehoe. Twenty children and four teachers died at this spot, and the village at Laupahoehoe Point vanished forever.

Honoka'a.

Looking down the road into Waipi'o Valley, which we did not drive.

Waipi'o Valley, where only a single road goes. A hiking path crossed this valley and climbs the opposite wall. I look forward to someday hiking this path.

A zoomed shot of the black sand beach at the base of Waipi'o Valley. All these valleys at the foot of Kohala seem to have a black sand beach. Over time, wave erosion will eat at these beaches, forcing them backward up the valley. The cliffs themselves will collapse in increments, and the island will shrink a piece at a time. This is why the other islands are so much smaller than the big island. They have eroded away.

Looking up into the Waipi'o Valley. You can just make out a building on the valley floor, some hippie shack owned by a guy named Dave. (Our guide book said an inordinate number of people who live here are named Dave.)

Waipi'o's cliffs, and the cliffs of other valleys beyond.

Me at the Waipi'o Valley overlook.

Robin at the Waipi'o Valley overlook.

A van full of tourists climbs the 25% grade. I've never driven a 25% grade, and I didn't drive one this day.

Robin climbs the steep path from the overlook the the parking lot above.

This is a restricted road. Only vehicles with four-wheel drive are allowed to drive past this point, as other vehicles would plummet down the grade.

Warning: 25% grade. I drove a few roads in British Columbia once with 17% or 18% grades, but I never imagined a 25% grade. I tend to laugh at Coloradans, who ride their brakes down mountains despite the fact that they should know better. I wonder what a Coloradan would do with this.

Waipi'o Lookout.

Incidentally, this gives me an opportunity to explain my use of apostrophe, which does not appear in this sign. My philosophy is that the proper spelling and pronunciation for any place is that used by those who live there. This is why I feel free to pronounce the name of the town of Versailles, Kentucky "Ver-sales" instead of "Ver-sigh." Hawaiian natives tend to add apostrophes to place names as a way of separating syllables. An example is the name of Hawai'i itself. While the official name of the state of Hawaii put forth in the state constitution may not contain an apostrophe, most natives include an apostrophe in the name of Hawai'i, so I follow their example. In most cases, I have been using the spelling set forth in my guide book, which follows native Hawaiian convention.

Day 7, Part 1-Akaka Falls

Above: Akaka Falls as it tumbles 442 feet into its gorge.

Thursday, September 3, 2009

It all began closing in on Thursday.

Those first few days of a vacation, when you first arrive in a beautiful place and have some long stream of days ahead of you, you don't really think about the passage of time. You have a world of time ahead of you, more time than you know what to do with so you feel fine just letting it fritter away. And then it fritters away. Minutes collect in great bunches and stream by, leaving you in a place you love with a deadline fast approaching. Two days before you leave--at least for me--that deadline looms large.

Our Thursday plan, then, was a vague plan formed in response to silent panic. We didn't want to panic, though, so we vowed not to rush. We made a point of pretending we still could fritter, so we hopped in the Jeep and headed north again along the Hamakua Coast.

We stopped was 11 miles up the road past Hilo, at the end of a curvy road through a light rain and a dead sugar plantation. We stopped at a parking lot where a hippie sat in a lawn chair making baskets for tourists from some kind of reedy leaf. We ignored the hippie and the bus full of Japanese tourists that pulled in behind us and followed a paved path through a make-believe jungle that wasn't make-believe.

The sidewalk split in two and formed a great circle, rising and falling up hills through masses of giant leaves, Hawai'i leaves twice as bug as my entire body. Bright flowers dotted the landscape, hanging from vines or rock walls or growing among clumps of Jurassic ferns. We passed banyan trees, jumbled knots of twisted trunk that looked like someplace an Ewok would live. We crossed little streams, passed over idyllic waterfalls, and found ourselves suddenly at an overlook into a circular gorge 400 feet deep. Moss covered the black rock walls of the gorge. And on the gorge's opposite side, Akaka falls tumbled from the cliff, shattering into mist as it plunged 442 feet.

My mind grasped for perspective. Forty-four stories. Twenty feet taller than the Wrigley Building in Chicago. Almost as tall as Louisville's Humana Building. About as tall as three Statues of Liberty stacked on top of each other.

A large group of tour bus Japanese were posing at the overlook fence, aligning themselves so that photographs would look as if the water were pouring into their mouths. (A very Japanese thing to do, it seems. I see Japanese tourists pretending to hold up the Sears Tower all the time.) Robin and I simply watched the spectacle of the falls in the building light as the sun emerged from behind the clouds. We watched the spray as it trickled down the walls. We watched the stream explode as it hit the bottom.

Pictures:

A different perspective of a shot posted a hundred times before, looking through the window along the coast outside our borrowed house as I loaded the Jeep.

Our borrowed house and our loaded Jeep.

The sun flirts with us as we move toward our first diversion of the day.

Hilo is home to the world-famous Mauna Loa macadamia nut plantation and factory, owned by Hersey's. We stopped this morning as we headed into Hilo. The road heads straight through the orchard of thousands of macadamia nut trees. The visitor center offers factory tours, but we only stayed long enough to buy a bunch of nuts as gifts for other people, which we subsequently ate. Buying macadamia nuts in Hawai'i to carry home is a test of one's altruistic nature. Robin and I are not very giving.

A dump truck full of macadamia nuts bore down upon us as we left the Mauna Loa nut plantation, and I briefly thought about hijacking it. But not even I could have eaten that many nuts.

Looking down the Mauna Loa plantation road toward the flank of distant Mauna Kea. I don't know what these tall trees are, but they look to me like evergreen versions of poplars.

Honomu Town, a tiny village on the way to Akaka Falls.

A random subdivision in Honomu.

Rain pours over the Hilo side.

We curve through an abandoned sugar plantation behind a van full of Japanese tourists.

Side note: I know that the sugar industry died on Hawai'i over the course of the last twenty years, and that it all but died in Florida over the same span. Vast tracts of former sugar plantations in Florida, for instance, have been turned over to the government and made into wildlife refuges. Meanwhile, I have been told that the price of sugar has long hovered near all-time highs. I have trouble reconciling these two facts.

A hippie in a lawn chair, making baskets from reeds in the parking lot at Akaka Falls State Park. The baskets actually were kind of neat, and if we hadn't had a shortage of luggage space I might have bought one.

A sign where the sidewalk splits before entering the jungle.

A monkey pod tree. I can officially identify more trees in Hawai'i than I can in Kentucky or Illinois.

A stand of bamboo. I had never before seen wild bamboo. Certain fancy new glass buildings in downtown Chicago have stands of bamboo growing in their giant glass lobbies, but these stands of bamboo look nothing like this.

Before the end of this day, I would learn the identity of this bloom. Before the end of the next day, I would forget. I have a mental block when it comes to plants.

The path descends into the jungle.

More bamboo. Like most plants--and animals, for that matter--bamboo is not native to Hawai'i, though it thrives in many corners of many islands. It is considered an invasive species, probably because there are no pandas to keep it in check.

A tranquil stream. Considering the proximity to the Akaka gorge and all the little streams running through here, I enjoy pondering the layout of the watercourses. The amount of water flowing through here is immense.

The trunk of a banyan tree. This is what I think the sanctuary moon of Endor must have looked like, at least before the ecological disaster wrecked by the destruction of the second Death Star. (Nerd moment.)

Another nifty plant, the identity of which I would learn and forget later.

The little loop trail actually offers vantage points for two falls into the gorge. This is Kahuna Falls, which is the same approximate height as Akaka but not situated as dramatically.

Moss. On Hilo side, moss grows everywhere.

Our first glimpse of Akaka Falls.

And our second glimpse as the sidewalk drops toward the overlook.

Akaka Falls.

Akaka Falls lies on Kolekole Stream, which eventually flows to a nice beach park we passed but didn't visit. Here, the stream explodes into fine mist.

The stream surges down the side of the cliff.

A rare example of Hawai'i finding it necessary to state the obvious.

Me at Akaka Falls.

Robin at Akaka Falls.

A little waterfall that probably suffers from feelings of inferiority.

Robin illustrates the scale of Hawaiian megaflora. All these fronds are part of the same leaf.

More insecure little waterfalls. You want to tell them that they're pretty enough in their own way, though you know they'll never belive you.

Day 6, Part 4-Waimea

Above: Looking south from a Waimea parking lot to the slopes of Mauna Kea, where famous telescopes stand watch.

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

We came to Waimea just as the setting sun painted the rolling slopes of Kohala in glowing orange. We returned to the borderland between desert and jungle, saw the clouds gathered around the eroded cinder cones and watched intense showers of rain falling a mile or less away as we drove through sunlight. Rainbows appeared.

With a population of 7,000, Waimea is the big island's third-largest town. It sits on the wide saddle between Kohala and Mauna Kea at around 2,500 feet, high enough to have a reputation for being cold, at least by Hawaiian standards. It gets down to 60 sometimes. The people of Waimea dress a little like the people of Colorado's high country. Once the center of a ranching empire, Waimea is a touristy town, a gathering of stoplights and strip malls. We stopped at one of these strip malls for dinner.

The restaurant was a little storefront Italian place called Solimene's, a real brick oven pizza type place that also does really good seafood pasta. I don't recall the specifics, but my meal involved shrimp and scallops about the size of a baseball, perfectly seared but not overdone. The view from the table, though, looked out into Waimea streets and across the wide saddle to Mauna Kea, glowing a deep red in the fading sun. A scattered array of clouds darted around the mountain, and I couldn't take my eyes from it. I watched the slopes, followed the ridge to the summit, where the white telescopes glowed brightly in the twilight.

I said to Robin, "I wonder if it's disconcerting for Waimea people to look up at those telescopes all the time. I wonder if they keep their curtains closed."

Pictures:

Driving from the coast to Waimea. You can begin to see the wall of clouds pushed against Kohala's eastern slope.

Kohala's clouds.

Looking south toward Mauna Kea. As oceanic as Hawai'i is, it's also something of a mountain paradise.

In Waimea.

A vague rainbow seen from the strip mall parking lot.

Looking south from the strip mall to Maune Kea with its little white specks of watchful eyes.

Tiramisu, which wasn't bad. It wasn't as good as the tiramisu at our own Italian place.

Day 6, Part 3-Around Kohala

Above: Looking down from an overlook into the Pololu Valley.

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

We ambled around Kohala after our zipline adventure, followed the winding road east. We stopped first at a rocky beach at Keokea Beach Park, where we clambered over massive black boulders and watched the surf. We drove on to the place where the road ends at the edge of Pololu Valley and stopped again at a parking lot that looked 400 feet into a sheer canyon where no road has ever gone. We gazed out over the sea to rocks covered in tropical green glimmering in the golden light of early evening, gazed over the black sand beach at the sea's edge and followed the valley up into the mountain. The valley was pristine, untouched. It was as if we were gazing into a past, some primitive island world that had never heard of humanity, all right there just 400 feet beneath us.

A map shows that Pololu is only the northernmost of a series of massive, steep-sided valleys gouged from the eastern flank of Kohala Mountain and standing side-by-side down the shore. To geologists, these valleys are an illustration of just how fragile land is on Hawai'i. Water can carve a canyon quickly from the islands' brittle rock, but Kohala is barely a half-million years old. Some of these canyons are as much as 2000-feet deep. Some of the shoreline cliffs between canyons drop a thousand feet to the waves, much farther than can be explained even by the extreme rainfall of Kohala's windward side. The explanation lies on the ocean floor in a fan of debris stretching 80 miles into the sea. About 250,000 years ago, the top 3,000 feet of Kohala and an unknown stretch of shoreline beneath it broke off and fell into the ocean in a massive landslide, creating a tsunami hundreds of feet high. It would have been as very bad day to be on Kohala, or in Los Angeles, for that matter.

A steep path leads from this parking lot into the valley. When I go back to Hawai'i, this path is one of the first things I want to see. The sun was fading and we were hungry, though, so we returned instead to the Jeep and followed the second of Kohala's two roads, traveling back into desert along the western shore through dry, wind-blown grass. You've seen this section of highway if you've ever been bored on a Saturday afternoon and found yourself watching coverage of the Ironman Triathlon. The bicycle course follows this portion of road. We stopped for a few minutes at Mahukona Beach Park and walked again over more black boulders showered in shattered waves. We looked across the sea where the sun was falling and saw a distant bank of clouds gathered around a vague black shadow, the looming bulk of Haleakala on Maui, 30 miles away.

We returned to the highway and continued south along the coast, staring at the bulk of Hualalai mountain on our own island and looking for the riches of North Kohala resorts.

Pictures:

Gazing down the slope of North Kohala to the north shore, five miles away and 2000 feet below.

A little picnic shelter on a hill at Keokea Beach State Park.

A bad shot of me at Keokea, searching the sea for Captain Cook's ship.

The ocean at Keokea Beach State Park. Interestingly, we could find no beach here. We happened to run into one of the other couples from our zipline adventure here, the father-daughter duo from St. Louis and Seattle. The daughter heard me comment on the lack of beach and said, "You know, a beach doesn't always have to be sand."

Looking west from Keokea Beach into Kapanai'a Bay. I don't know why Hawaiian language has such a fixation with the letter K.

The sea cliffs seen from the Pololu Valley overlook. These cliffs stand at the entrance to a series of valleys extending 30 miles down the coast.

Off-shore rocks at Pololu Valley.

Me at Pololu Valley.

Robin at Pololu Valley in her Battlestar Gallactica t-shirt.

A glimpse of the black sand of Pololu Black Sand Beach, 400 feet below us.

Looking up into Pololu Valley.

Back in the Jeep on the road near the sea, and a glimpse of windmills at a North Kohala wind farm.

The sea at Mahukona Beach Park.

Black lava rock and a lack of beach at Mahukona Beach.

Here, you see the weakness of our camera. If you look in these distant clouds, you'll see a dark smudge. This is the summit of Haleakala on Maui. And this isn't even a good representation of how it really looked. Much as Mauna Loa loomed much more ominously than earlier photographs showed, Haleakala seemed to rise high above us. It didn't seem nearly so distant, at least to me. It seemed almost to be right there next to us ... though Robin never saw it. She couldn't pick out mountain from cloud.

Looking south along the Kohala coast to Hualalai, Hawai'i's third oldest mountain rising 8,271 feet. The town of Kona is somewhere at the mountain's western edge.

Approaching Kawaihae, where we turned back inland toward Waimea.

Another view of Hualalai. One of these days, I'm going to figure out the optical principle that causes our camera lens to shrink shield volcanoes down to nothing. This, too, appeared much larger than it seems here.

Day 6, Part 2-Ripper and Juliet Zip Through the Forest

Above: Robin just hanging around Kohala.

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Every trip, we try to find one semi-costly, tour-group type planned activity that lets us pretend we're on the Amazing Race. We might raft down the Snake River at Grand Teton, for instance, or ride a helicopter to the middle of an Alaskan glacier. In Hawai'i, we opted for a zipline canopy tour.

The zipline operates out of a little shack in the middle of a field a mile or so outside Kapa'au, where people give you forms that say you can't sue anybody should you plummet 200 feet to your death. We gathered around a table with our tour companions, a typically random cast of characters from some '70s disaster epic: A grandmother from Los Angeles with her bent and bitter 14-year-old granddaughter; an older St. Louis man just now recovering from a heart attack and his middle-age daughter from Seattle; an owner of a landscape business from Golden, Colorado, and his wife, who works in human resources for an unnamed major international corporation; a young, heavily-tattooed couple on their honeymoon, too interested in each other to tell anybody where they were from. I looked over the troupe as I always do on these things and pondered which of us would die suddenly and further the plot.

Our guides who two young guys, native Hawaiians in their early 20s with truncated names typically given to the children of hippies, Bran or Brie or something similar. They both began with B's. They were the best kind of guides, though, gifted with natural skills in public relations and really nice smiles, in addition to an obvious love of their island. They joked a lot about random jungle death as they wrapped us in harness and gave us helmets with random nicknames scrawled in marker over the front. (I was Ripper. Robin was Juliet.)

They loaded us into some army surplus all-terrain troop carrier with a really bad rear differential and drove across North Kohala roads until they reached a gate and realized they'd forgotten the keys. They took us back to get the keys, then returned to the gate and this time went through. We spent about 20 minutes bouncing over muddy jungle roads that twisted through the misty valleys of Kohala, then piled out at the start of a tree-shrouded path.

Our path took us over a swinging bridge and eight ziplines criss-crossing a side canyon off the Pololu Valley. The ziplines started out small, short lengths of cable maybe 200 feet long and only 10 or 15 feet above masses of giant ferns or flowering ginger bushes or other plants. We stood in a group, chatting about our outside lives as the guides strapped us in, one-by-one, and sent us hurtling into the void. As we went on, the void grew larger. The cables topped 600 feet, the 800, then a thousand. We crossed deep gorges, suspended over drops approaching 200 feet. We zipped over waterfalls, and my feet clipped the tops of 200-foot-high ironwoods.

I tried shooting pictures a few times as I zipped, but in the rush I always pushed the wrong button. Your mind isn't on electronics in the middle of something like that, though it's not on the drop, either. It's absorbed in the rush, the thrill of shooting through the wind, the blur of the foliage, the sound of the pulley on the cable. All else fades.

Pictures:

Robin in her helmet, riding through the jungle.

And me in my helmet. They wanted us to wear the helmets in the troop carrier, because the carrier had metal bars across the roof. We bounced a lot and hit our heads.

An open spot along the path, looking across the hillside to the Pololu Valley. Our guides explained that this massive piece of land was owned by a Japanese company which had bought it with an eye toward development. Thy ran afoul of state regulations, though, and were forced to leave the land as it was. They decided instead to lease it to the zipline company and a few farmers.

The Kohala Ditch, a 22-mile irrigation ditch finished in 1906. The ditch carried water from Honokane Stream, 1030 feet above sea level, to sugar plantations near the town of Hawi, passing through 17 miles of tunnels in the process. Tour companies had operated raft rides down the ditch in recent years, at least until a magnitude 6.7 earthquake wrecked a portion of the ditch in 2006. The tour operator then skipped town, leaving his employees--and his creditors--in the lurch.

We passed an empty troop carrier on the road. The driver called out, "I lost them all!"

The guide straps Robin onto the zipline.

Me, pretending to look cool in my jaunty little helmet.

A bridge through the jungle.

The Los Angeles grandmother zips right along.

The landscaper from Golden.

Halfway through the tour, we stopped for a snack at a pavilion overlooking a 34-foot waterfall. We ate fresh fruit and Macadamia nut bread.

Robin and I pose with the waterfall in the background.

The swinging bridge.

The guides do a pretty good job of breaking tension and measuring how sure each of us is about the whole affair. They knew Robin was only a little nervous about the height, so they figured she'd be okay if they shook the bridge a little as she crossed. Later, she said, "I was this far from flipping him off until I realized it wasn't you."

The longest zipline, about a thousand feet with a top speed around 60 miles per hour.

The hillside near the Pololu Valley.

Inside the troop carrier.

Robin having fun.

A duck near a creek the road crossed. We stopped, and the guides fed the duck bread.

The duck comes closer.

Back at the shack.

Our troop carrier. The guides told us the company owner had bought these off eBay from somebody in Sweden.

Day 6, Part 1- Drive to Kohala

Above: Looking south from the crest of the road over Kohala, toward Hualalai and the Kona coast.

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

This would be our road trip day. The sky was clear when we climbed into the Jeep, and I stared out the window at the bulk of Mauna Kea that loomed above Hilo. You usually can't see Mauna Kea from Hilo even though it's right there, but on this morning I could pick out the little white dots at the summit, the telescopes of the famous Mauna Kea observatory. And then I let myself fall into the scenery, watching the landscape as we drove in and out of seaside canyons on the road through Hamakua.

Our goal this morning was Kohala. The big island is divided into six districts, the borders of which roughly correspond to the territories of ancient kingdoms. Kohala--itself divided into North and South Kohala--is the northernmost of these districts. It rests on the flanks of the Kohala volcano, the oldest of the island's five volcanic mountains which juts in a peninsula from the island's north side. Kohala last erupted about 120,000 years ago, and most of the mountain has since eroded away. What remains is a husk of mountain that nevertheless rises 5,505 feet above sea level, high enough that it reaches into the trade winds and creates a rain shadow just as extensive as that of Mauna Loa or Mauna Kea. Water pours in constant torrents off Kohala's east side, while the west is always clear.

We turned inland just south of Kohala and passed through the town of Waimea, which itself sits at 2,000 feet. We saw clouds butt up against the mountain just our heads, shrouding nearby hills. We turned north, then, and the world changed. This is common in Hawai'i, where a difference of 10 miles can mean a hundred inches or more of rain a year. You can almost pick out the line, stop the car and straddled the space between jungle and desert. The road climbed Kohala's side, and the world turned back to Wyoming grassland, complete with cows from the world-famous Parker Ranch (which we skipped completely).

We came down the other side into the little town of Hawi, then turned right and drove into Kapa'au, known as the birthplace of Kamehameha the Great. We stopped for lunch at a little sandwich and coffee joint in a tiny strip of town buildings given over to tourists. We sat in a courtyard, looked over a bulletin board advertising yoga classes and studio apartments, and watched neon lizards climb the courtyard walls.

Pictures:

Land grows older as you move north on the island, and with age comes erosion. The hills have taken on a rounded look that actually reminds me a lot of Kentucky.

They even complete their Kentucky impression with white clapboard fences. I might have taken this in Lexington.

More Kentucky hills.

But this is not Kentucky rain. The trade winds are pushing these clouds up the mountain. They have completely engulfed a rounded knob hill (actually an old cinder cone).

Long extinct cinder cones north of Waimea. Do not confuse the town of Waimea, by the way, with the famous Waimea Canyon, which is on Kaua'i. Different island tend to recycle names.

Another nifty cinder cone. The north end of the island has all kinds of hills I'd love to climb.

Looking toward western flank of the Kohala volcano. The land is changing.

The land has changed.

Looking south from an overlook at the side of Kohala, about 4,000 feet above sea level. The bulge of mountain at left is Mauna Kea. The bulge at right is Hualalai, a smaller mountain that still reaches 8,271 feet. Somewhere between the two is Mauna Loa, shrouded in distant cloud.

Looking across 10 miles and 4,000 feet at one of the North Kohala fancy resorts. These resorts are the most popular and most exclusive on the island ... though I have to say, that beach looks artificial.

Coming down the mountain.

A statue dedicated to Kamehameha the Great.

I have to admit that my typical American ambivalence to history that isn't entirely American had convinced me that Kamehameha was almost a myth figure, though he's as real as George Washington and held in the same regard by the Hawaiian people. Admittedly, his life is the stuff of myth, starting with his birth around 1758 in the face of a Herod-like prophesy that cause his to be spirited off and hidden in Waipi'o Canyon. As a young man, he just happened to be fighting a losing war on Maui when Captain James Cook made his appearance. Kamehameha was wise enough to know his world had changed at that moment, and he dedicated himself to placing Hawai'i in the best possible position. He is said to have the strength of Hercules, the mind of Thomas Jefferson, military leadership of Napolean, and the political savvy of Karl Rove. He rose to lead his kingdom in 1782 at the age of 23. By 1790 he had conquered all the island's kingdoms, and over the next 20 years he conquered the kingdoms of every island. He united all the people of all Hawai'i for the first time in history. Kamehameha finally died in 1819, having built Hawai'i into a strong nation and a respectable ally--ally, still, not yet colony--to Britain.

Our lunch in Kapa'au, a delicious turkey sandwich on croissant.

The restroom at our breakfast place, included to illustrate Hawai'i's tendency to put large windows in restrooms. This one overlooked a narrow passageway.

The courtyard where we ate lunch.

A lizard watches us, waiting for his opportunity, perhaps, to tell us he saved a bundle on car insurance.

Regardless of how much this lizard may have saved, he was here in search of a free lunch. He soon left the wall and jumped in the tub for dirty dishes, begging scraps.

The Kamehameha Statue in front of the civic center in Kapa'au. This statue has a story almost as interesting as Kamehameha himself. It was originally commissioned by the Hawaiian government in 1878 to celebrate the centennial of the James Cook expedition. For reasons both political and stupid, though, the Hawaiians turned to an Italian to build the statue, and the Italian didn't finish it until 1883. He then loaded the statue on a ship, which wrecked off the coast of the Falkland Islands.

Fortunately, the Hawaiians had insurance on the statue and used the money to build another one from the same mold. About the time the Italians finished that statue, though, Falkland Islanders found the original, which they sold to the captain of the wrecked ship for $500. The captain then turned around and sold it back to the Hawaiians--who only lost it because the captain wrecked his ship--for $875. Thus, the Hawaiians now had two statues. They put the second statue in front of Ali'iolani Hale, the seat of the Hawaiian government in Honolulu. They then decided that since they had two statues, they might as well have three, and they made another to place in the hall of the U.S. Capitol. They put the original here, in Kapa'au, where Kamehameha was born.

A fancy Hawaiian historic marker, a bit more colorful than the bronze things you find in Kentucky or Illinois.

Downtown in metropolitan Kapa'au.

Tree.

The Kapa'au Civic Center.

An abandoned car engulfed by the rain forest. You don't want to leave a car sitting long in Hawai'i. This is not an uncommon sight.

Day 5, Part 5-Dinner With Uncle Billy

Above: A lovely boat drink in a beautiful shade of antifreeze at Uncle Billy's Restaurant.

Monday, September 1, 2009

Our dinner plan had been to head into Hilo and try Harrington's, a steak and seafood joint our guide book seemed to like mostly because it overlooked a seaside pond. The economy has been rough on Hilo, though, and Harrington's had died. We cruised through the small row of fancy resorts along Banyan Drive instead and finally settled on Uncle Billy's Restaurant, an open-air place in the parking lot of Uncle Billy's Hilo Bay Hotel.

There is a side to Hawai'i we didn't really explore that's stuck in the past, and this would be fine if they hadn't specifically chosen to be stuck in 1978. This is Hawaii without the apostrophe, Don Ho Hawaii, Book-'em-Dan-O and early Thomas Magnum Hawaii, and Uncle Billy's Restaurant is this Hawaii's Hilo centerpiece. The building is a make-believe storm-shuttered shack adorned with lime green walls the exact color of a refrigerator my grandparents had when I was a kid. Fake orchids and coconuts and bikinis hang from the ceiling. The chairs and carpet are a worn, gaudy floral print that matched the servers' shirts and muumuus--and yes, some of the servers wore muumuus, and they all wore leis.

The hostess sat us at a table in the middle of the floor, despite the fact that the restaurant's only other occupants were a dour couple in a corner and a cat who had jumped in through the open window and was sitting on a table in the back. A local musician strummed a guitar on a stage at the restaurant's front, a native Hawaiian who'd grown up listening to too much Gordon Lightfoot. He sang with all his heart to us, the other couple, and the cat, belting out songs he'd written of lost Hawaii sprinkled with random Hawaiian words to drive the point home, and I marvelled at the irony that he was singing these songs in a resort that had paved over a beach. The other couple clapped obediently at the end of every song, and the musician weakly tried humorous musician banter with the restaurant's empty chairs.

I figured that since I was stuck in 1978 TV Hawaii, I might as well have a 1978 TV Hawaii drink from the boat drink list. I wish I could remember the name of the drink, though I'm fairly sure it had something to do with Elvis Presley, Blue Hawaii or Rock-a-Hula or something. They brought me something green to match the walls. It looked like a fancy glass of Prestone. It tasted like moss.

The food quality matched the drink. Robin ordered some chicken and pasta thing in a sauce that reminded me of Pepto-Bismol but had the opposite effect. I had charcoal masquerading as shrimp and a medium-rare piece of fat marbled with small bits of meat. My potato looked as if it had swum here from Idaho all on its own. I chewed every bite for about a half-hour. The cat left, deciding, I guess, that the food wasn't worth stealing.

Robin and I couldn't keep ourselves from laughing as we walked through parking lot. "You know, we have a remarkable ability to stumble on good food," I said. "Nine out of ten times, we find all these charming little places. I guess this was the tenth time."

Robin nodded. "We were due," she said.

Pictures:

The beautiful lime green decor of Uncle Billy's Restaurant.

1978 resort Hawaii at its best.

The other couple, who ate in silence. They only looked up from their food to clap whenever the singer finished a song.

A bad picture, I know, but I had to include this. We returned in darkness to our borrowed home and saw the bright lights of this cruise ship off the coast headed south. We sat on the front balcony by the ocean for a while, watching the ship and imagining the parties that must be going on in the ball rooms, the dancing, the singing, the fun. I imagined Captain Stubing, circa 1978, sitting in a ball room, listening to a song from special guest star Carol Channing. Or maybe Tony Orlando. Or Wayne Newton. It would be Uncle Billy's times fifty.

We heard none of this noise. We watched in silence as the ship vanished behind Cape Kumukahi far, far away.

Day 5, Part 4-The Road to Kalapana

Above: A wave explodes against a 40-foot cliff at MacKenzie State Recreation Area, just off Highway 137.

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

From Kapoho, we turned south onto Highway 137. The road travels the length of the Puna Coast from Cape Kumukahi to Kalapana, often within sight of the ocean. It's one of Puna's more deserted, backwoods roads that tunnels through caverns of vine-draped foliage beneath a shelter of monkey pod canopy. This is deep into Hawai'i hippie territory, where bitter, pierced youth mingle with old guys who could tell you about that time they stuck flowers in National Guard rifle barrels in San Francisco, except they can't remember that far back. We passed a tattooed kid in Wicker Park hipster flannel riding a horse, walking next to a tattooed shirtless kids holding a skateboard. A few miles down the road, we passed a tie-dyed jogger with long, white hair that flowed over his shoulders but had abandoned the top of his head.

Little parks line this road, and we stopped at Isaac Hale Beach Park long enough to use a rest room, take look at the fishing boat ramp, and get the stink eye from a bunch of local types gathered around a picnic bench where a radio blared. We followed a short path along the shore, past a no trespassing sign to a tiny, freshwater pool heated by underground thermals. Too many others had claimed the pool, so we moved on.

We stopped again at MacKenzie State Recreation Area, a shaded campground perched atop a 40-foot-high lava cliff in a grove of evergreen trees called ironwood. A thick bed of soft ironwood needles covered the hard lava, making us think this would be a great place to camp. We parked on needles near the edge of the cliff, then walked to a place where others had gathered around a small inlet to watch waves. The inlet acted as a funnel, and waves piled on top of each other as they came in, then exploded against the cliff. Every few minutes, a wave exploded high enough above the cliff's edge to shower whoever happened to be standing there.

From there, the road ducks past hermit homes and overgrown highway signs. Every few miles offered pullouts where paths led to places for tourists to scrambled over shoreline rock and tempt rogue waves. A grove of richie-rich homes stood on great manicured lawns near Kalapana, the last survivors subdivisions long destroyed. One of these homes was shaped like a castle, and I imagined the trauma that would befall the king if the lava flowing just a couple of miles down the road decided to come back and absorb his kingdom.

This road, like the Kalapana road we'd travelled the night before, ended at the edge of the 1990 lava flow, where Kalapana's dispossessed had built a tiny enclave designed to recall lost glory. A little clump of open-air bars and fruit stands stood by the lava pile. Most of the people operating the stands had given up for the day. They gathered at one of the bars and gossiped at each other as they knocked back samples of their own products. We moved on to a cinder block building next door that sold ice cream and ate cones of frozen mangoes.

Pictures:

Waves pound the rocky shore at MacKenzie State Recreation Area.

Ironwood trees and a soft bed of needles. There are campsites here, making us wish we could have brought our camping equipment.Hawai'i doesn't often bother warning of places where you can die, and they don't believe in false alarms. If you see a sign like this, you do well to believe it.

An inlet that serves as a funnel for waves.

Wave-soaked lava cliffs. Most of the lava here is from a 1790 flow.

The Jeep among ironwoods.

Shooting through the jungle along the Puna Coast road. Our camera has a hard time in low light and can't keep up with a lot of movement. Sometimes, though, this creates a nice effect.

Overgrown, moss-covered jungle signs.

The narrow road through the coastal jungle.

A shoreline pullout.

The jungle opens up at the 1990 Kalapana flow. The steam plume we'd visited the night before rose in the distance.

Diners eat tasty diner food at a little shack at the end of the Kalapana road.

Robin enjoys her mango ice cream. I got an orange-pineapple mix.

Kalapana's open-air bar shacks.

Bar shacks seen from the parking lot. The sign said open, but the bartender didn't really believe it.

A jogging hippie.

Looking up into the monkey pod canopy.

Between Kapoho and Pahoa.

Day 5, Part 3-Kapoho Tide Pools

Above: The Kapoho Tide Pools.

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

We followed up our morning at Champagne Pond with an afternoon at the Kapoho Tide Pools. Kapoho actually had been the first place we'd snorkeled when we tested our rented equipment on Saturday afternoon. And of the two snorkel spots we tried, Kapoho was my favorite.

As at Champagne Pond, a subdivision full of expensive vacation homes surrounds the Kapoho Tide Pools, though Kapoho's home owners are a lot more laid back. Instead of a gate to their community, they have a sign welcoming visitors to use their private roads. In exchange, they ask that visitors not clog the streets, which is easy enough since the residents spent their own money to build a parking lot next to the pools. A locked can hangs on a pole next to the lot with a sign asking that visitors make donations for maintenance, but nobody checks whether or not you give money.

The lava that forms this piece of shoreline is much older and much more weathered and worn that the jagged devastation left over from the 1960 eruption to the north. The sea has carved several hundred feet of coast into dozens of interconnected pools. Freshwater springs feed some of these pools. Others are heated by underground thermals. Many pools are shallow, no more than a few feet deep, depending on the tide. Others are ten feet deep or deeper. You can find pools here protected from surf, and other pools open to ocean. Currents created by tide surge softly in and out of the more protected pools, so that it's possible to just let yourself drift.

Unlike Champagne Pond, though, most pools are never completely cut off from the sea, even at low tide. Sea life is free to come and go as it pleases, and the pools are full of fish. And these aren't just any old fish. These are beautiful Pacific fish, fish in vibrant colors that glow in sunlight filtered through brilliant blue. A few of these fish are huge, three feet or more in length. Others are tiny and like to hide beneath rocks or in crevices. Most are about the size of my hand, and are painted in blue and orange and yellow and purple.

Similar colors spread out over the bottoms of the deeper pools in corals, vast structures in vivid yellow or lavender. Spiky sea urchins fill holes in the rock. A few sea slugs rest at the bottom, along with wispy things, little clouds of white lace that might have been related to jellyfish. The variety of life surrounding us was immense, far too much for me to catalogue. It was a Nemo world, an aquarium world. This was the world aquariums think they're idealizing, though no aquarium I've seen was as perfect as this.

Robin has much more interest in sea life than I do, and she's read volumes of books and watched hours of PBS specials on the subject. Yet even she was stymied in identifying most of it. She darted from place to place, snapping pictures with her underwater cameras. All I could manage in the meantime was to drift. I floated in silent water and watched the real life aquarium around me.

Pictures:

The palm-lined road leading into the subdivision surrounding the Kapoho Tide Pools. The subdivision is called Vacationland, and is one of the more popular locations for vacation rentals, though there are many permanent residents here, too.

A fancy shoreline home next to the tide pools.

The Kapoho Tide Pools. The area next to the shore is a mixture of a'a and pahoehoe, so you need cheap surf shoes to get to the water. We tiptoed over little lava dikes to a favorite pool about a hundred feet out.

Underwater shots. I won't be able to identify most of what you see here, though I can tell you the large, fan-like structure in shadow beneath the rock ledge is a type of coral about four or five feet wide.

A couple of butterfly fish, I think.

A little blue guy.

A school of big fish, each about a foot or more across. It was fun to follow schools of fish like these around. They move at a leisurely pace, so that even a weak swimmer like me can keep up.

The same school, from a distance. They're outrunning us.

You can kind of see a yellowish blob at the center of the image at a distance. This is a brain coral.

Me.

A slight tinge of purple shows up here, but not nearly as vivid as it did in person. Purple coral in neon colors lines the bottom of deeper pools farther out.

Leaving Kapoho, at least for the day.

Day 5, Part 2-Pahoa Church

Above: Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Pahoa. I have searched, but nobody seems to have listed anything of this building's history online. Again, were I a journalist type doing this for money, I'd make a few calls.

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

We passed through Pahoa between tide pool adventures and decided to take advantage of a blue-sky day to take a few pictures. I pulled into a parking lot between a Montessori school and an old church I'd seen. This was my favorite kind of church, a tiny white country church with a steeple among lush greenery that makes you understand why God got into real estate. I drove toward the back of the lot to get a good angle. I stopped at the entrance to a cemetery that stretched into foliage several hundred feet and got out of the Jeep with my camera.

I'd shot a few photos when a man appeared, a native Hawaiian of Polynesian descent, dressed in a dirty blue t-shirt and torn pair of pants and holding a rake. He smiled as he approached, though I saw suspicion in his expression. Children played on a school playground behind him. He called out a hello.

I waved, smiled, said, "That's a beautiful church. I wanted to get a few pictures."

"This is one of the best churches on the island," the man said. And then he made clear the source of his concern. "You need somebody to take your picture?"

This surprised me. "Sure!" I said, and called Robin over. We stood together as the man snapped the shot.

"Where are you visiting from?" he asked. We said Chicago. "That's a long way," he said, then instantly discounted the idea that Chicago might exist. Chicago didn't matter. "You chose a good place to visit. What you should do, I think, is go to the volcano and see the lava at night. I hear this is a good time. And there are tide pools near here, good for swimming. It's one of my favorite places."

The man never stopped smiling as he offered us directions, pointed us through his favorite bits of a land he'd known all his life.

Day 5, Part 1-Champagne Pond

Above: Robin beneath the sea. I think this is the best picture of anybody, ever.

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Tuesday, we decided, would be snorkel day.

Snorkeling actually had been a recurrent theme up to this point, though I haven't mentioned it yet. One of the first things we'd done when we came to Hilo was rent snorkel equipment from a bitter hippie. We'd tested the equipment that first day in tide pools near Kapoho (which I'll talk about later). After that, snorkeling became our default option. If we could do nothing else the entire trip, we'd be perfectly happy, because we could always go snorkeling. We wanted to try it everywhere.

Neither of us are good in water, though, so we confined ourselves to a couple of proven snorkel destinations near our borrowed home. We'd read about Champagne Pond in our guide book, and our interest had been piqued Tuesday morning by a coincidental article in the Hawaii Tribune-Herald discussing land use issues and the rights of property owners versus public shoreline access. We didn't care about any of that. The article told us Champagne Pond was a good place to snorkel, and that's all that mattered.

The bulk of Champagne Pond is an artificial inlet, carved with a bulldozer from a chunk of the 1960 lava flow that swallowed Kapoho. A gated community had sprung up from nothing along a stretch of new shoreline. Million-dollar homes line the shore, their backyards facing the clear blue waters of a Pacific cove wrapped in the protective embrace of lava breakwaters. Magma still flows underground near the surface here, and its effect shimmers in the pond's waters. Champagne Pond is heated.

The million-dollar homes protect their own access to the pond with a gate, but that doesn't make much difference to the state, which deems the shoreline public property. We had a four-wheel drive Jeep. All we needed to do was drive to the lighthouse at Cape Kumukahi, find one of a dozen rough gray lava roads over the a'a, and bounce a mile or so south to the pond. We'd come into the gated community from the back, something that bugs the hell out of richie-rich homeowners but is completely legal. Locals do it all the time.

We got there in the early morning when the tide was still low, but rising. A natural barrier stands between the pond and the cove at low tide, so you don't have to worry about waves. We slipped into the pond, pulled down our masks, and let ourselves float.

I still wasn't sure about this whole snorkel thing, but I gained a little confidence every time I ventured into water. Champagne Pond was easy, separate from the ocean so that I could flounder if I needed to flounder without having to worry about waves or current dragging me to sea. That morning, we were the only ones in the pond, so I didn't have to worry about getting in anybody's way. All I had to do was float and try to figure out my breathing.

I floated well enough to follow a collection of little yellow fish. I watched the blur of warm water as I drifted over the thermals and heard the crackle of heat percolating through the rocks. I looked to the middle of the pond and noticed a green sea turtle resting at the bottom, taking a break from the rough ocean. Robin noticed the turtle just as I did, and she yelped through her mask and nearly drowned in surprise.

She circled the turtle a few times and shot a few pictures with her underwater camera. And then, as if it felt like showing off, the turtle rose and swam in circles of its own. We all swam together for a while, like something from a movie. We enjoyed the peaceful world we'd lucked into.

Pictures:

The road to Cape Kumukahi, where the light stands.

Go to the light and take a right onto the field of a'a, and this is what you see.

Two roads diverged in a lava field. They both looked to have been traveled about equally, though, and they both went to the same place. There are dozens of roads swirling around each other here, and they all wind up at the same destination.

Looking over the lava field at the back side of the gated community next to Champagne Pond.

This marker sits along one of the lava roads next to the ocean. I don't know whether this is an actual grave or just a marker, whether there's a body here or just ashes, or whether this is simply a place where someone's spirit felt like resting. The person memorialized died in 2000, though, and while the items left here are faded and worn, they are not nine years worth of worn. This marker is well tended.

And because we live in the information age, the obituary from the Honolulu Star-Bulletin on April 13, 2000:

Gary Y. "Bozo" Sumi, 52, of Pahoa, Hawaii, a former employee of Paul's Enterprises Ltd., died Tuesday at home. He was born in Olaa, Hawaii. He is survived by wife Thelma; son Izaak; daughters Cheri Wilson and Rochelle Sumi; parents Yoshito and Misao; sisters Naomi Brockman and Ruth Horikawa, and six grandchildren. Services: 6 p.m. Saturday at Puna Hongwanji Mission. Call after 5 p.m. Casual attire.

Were I still in my journalist phase and writing this thing for money rather than fun, I'd track down Izaak Sumi or Rochelle Sumi and ask about this marker.

The Jeep on the lava road by the sea.

The green sea turtle, lounging in the warm pools of Champagne Pond. Sadly, this turtle had some sort of growth at the side of his head. I have no idea what this is, though Robin tells me such things are not uncommon for certain sea creatures.

Me, trying to figure out how not to drown.

We swam with a turtle.

Champagne Pond is fairly protected, so there aren't the corals here you'll see in other places on the island. The bottom is mostly bare rock, with some parts of the pond covered with algae. This seems to be almost a fish nursery. All the fish here are little.

Bare rock and fish. In the clear water, you could see the shimmer of heat from the thermals. A crackling sound echoed through the water as heat percolated through the rocks. The water conducted the sound so it it seemed as if the crackling were right by our ears.

Champagne Pond, from the open side looking at the homes of rich people who would rather I not be here. Native Hawaiians are trying to get better access through the subdivision, but the homeowners are fighting any intrusions on their territory, using all the arguments the lucky always use when trying hard not to share what isn't theirs anyway.

Looking out over the cove outside the protected area of Champagne Pond.

A house on stilts on the opposite side of the cove.

A washed out shot of Champagne Pond, taken with the disposable underwater camera. The quality's weak, but I kind of like this shot.

Day 4, Part 5-Neighborhood Thoughts

Above: Paradise Drive and the entrance to Hawaiian Paradise Park.

Monday, August 31, 2009

We headed back to the house after our south island jaunt. Our plan was to clean ourselves up, then head into Hilo for dinner at Sombat's, a Thai place in a little medical office-like structure mentioned in our guide book. (The Thai was excellent, almost better than our own little Thai place in Chicago, though I'd never say so to anybody around here.) We came to the end of Paradise Drive just before sunset and bounced our way home.

Paradise Drive stretches four miles from Highway 11 in a dead-straight line that completely ignores topography. It's a privately-owned road built about 50 years ago by people who didn't concern themselves with complicated principles of highway engineering like grading or drainage. It looks as if it had been surveyed by a guy with a stick and a kite string and then carved out by another guy with a bulldozer "borrowed" from a construction site somewhere, and I'm almost sure they were paid in six-packs. The road dips and jumps in a continual sine wave and somehow manages to swerve even as it goes straight. It's possible at several points for Jeeps to get airborne at 30 miles per hour.

Paradise Drive was only the first four of 137 miles of crisscrossed private roadway eventually built on a whim in the Hawaiian Paradise Park subdivision--though only four of these roads were ever paved. And none of these roads have ever been touched by the state of Hawai'i. Homeowners maintain them to this day.

The entire subdivision serves as perfect example of a very Hawaiian notion of land-use and development, one that is far less likely to involve any formal government direction or oversight than my mainland mind would expect. The subdivision got its start sometime in the 1950s just before statehood, when the 12-square-mile parcel was traded for a building in Honolulu to the Watmull family. (The Watmulls seem to have some importance around Hilo, though the only representative I could find online was David Watmull, CEO of a pharmaceutical company based in California.) The family built Paradise Drive down the center of the plot and then divided their new empire into 9,000 one-acre lots. In the early days, they sold these lots for about $500 each. You could have bought two of them for what we pay in rent every month in Chicago. Even adjusted for inflation, that's only about $4,000 today.

The Watmulls advertised their properties all across the mainland, and mainlanders bought most of them unseen to house some imaginary vacation paradise. Of course, locals thought the mainlanders were nuts. The area had no water lines and no hope for water lines because the county sure wasn't going to build them. Only properties low on the slope could drill wells. Everybody else had to depend on water catchment systems, gathering rainwater falling on roofs in giant tubs. There was no sewer, no telephone, and at first no electricity. There was only rain forest growing over lava and a vague notion of some Hawaiian version of American dream.

But people bought it. They always do. The properties were all sold by the '70s, though many remain vacant today. Some lots hold rickety claim shacks. Others hold beautiful vacation homes like ours. Some owners have never seen their lots, which they bought as investments while plugging away at jobs in New York or Los Angeles or Chicago. Other lots are home to people who will never leave. And all of it, every single inch, has never felt the touch of government hands. This is not a town, not a county, not anything at all.

Hawaiian Paradise Park is only one example of this kind of development on the island, though it is one of the better examples. Hawaiian law doesn't really police this sort of thing, and any developer who stumbles onto some vast piece of property can turn it into a town-sized subdivision if he feels like it. In the '60s, for instance, some oil company tried turning 11,000 acres of waterless desert on the pali high above South Point into Hawaiian Ocean View Estates. They carved a vast grid of crosshatched roads, but the only takers were hermits. As recently as 2000, one-acre lots in HOVE, as it's known, could be bought for $1,500. Many locals still say this is too much.

Orchidland Estates is a slightly smaller clone of Hawaiian Paradise Park on the mountain side of Highway 130 near Pahoa. Other subdivisions dot the island--Hawaiian Riviera, SeaMountain, Kapho Vacationland, Black Sand Beach (which at 1500 feet is nowhere near a beach of any color). The island is full of little pieces of pseudo-livable paradise, carved up and served without reservation to anybody--usually some absentee mainlander--with enough money and enough of an empty dream unfettered by sense to make a go of it.

As for us, we were happy with our borrowed piece of dream. We didn't care whether the land made sense or had the sanction or protection of higher law. All we cared about was that for a week we had some piece of lava at the end of a bumpy road, where lava met the sea.

Pictures:

The rolling hills hear the western end of Paradise Drive.

Our place, the last house on the right on Paradise Drive.

Our lava cliff, posted because I have a hundred of these photos and can't decide which one I like best.

Looking across the smooth lava out to sea.

Day 4, Part 4-Black Sand and Wildlife

Above: Hawai'i's only real example of charismatic megafauna, as Robin calls it. A green sea turtle lounges at Punalu'u Black Sand Beach.

Monday, August 31, 2009

We silently stewed as we left South Point behind. Not that we were angry. We merely were disappointed, dusty and tired and covered in dried sweat. The walk back up the hill to the Jeep had left us thirsty and exhausted and had taken more time than we'd planned.

Still, we stopped a few times to take photographs or look at the ocean from viewpoints high up on the slope. We chuckled at the sight of a strange hippie woman in a flower muumuu standing with her thumb out in Na'alehu, trying as hard to hitch a ride now as she'd been when we passed five hours earlier. We stopped for a few minutes at a park on the coast where ruins of an old wharf still crumbled into the sea. We used a restroom last cleaned sometime late in the reign of Kamehameha the Great to wash some of the dust from our arms and legs, then climbed back in the Jeep where more dust waited.

We stopped again at Punalu'u Black Sand Beach, the most accessible collection of black sand on the island. Black sand beaches form from lava that reaches the ocean, quickly cools, then shatters. Waves further grind the shattered lava bits into sand, which gathers in protected coves. The beaches often lie at the foot of lava cliffs, which themselves may be accessible only by crossing long stretches of broken lava terrain. Highway engineers don't like to waste a lot of time on Hawai'i, so the state only bothered building roads to a few of the beaches. The volcano has proven the engineers' point by swallowing most of these. Punalu'u, then, is unique.

The beach lies just a short distance from Highway 11, along a little loop road that passes between a golf course and the remains of a brush fire that had burned about twelve acres four days earlier. A slight tinge of smoke still hung in the air, and we stopped long enough to gawk at the burned husks of fallen trees. We stopped in a parking lot, climbed over a few rocks which waves had worn smooth, and stood among coconut palms in a scene from a Hawaiian postcard. The beach stretched around the cove to our left.

We took off our shoes and walked through the sand to the water. I had always assumed black sand would hold more heat than its lighter equivalent, but even in direct sunlight this sand wasn't hot at all. It was more coarse than most white or yellow sand that I'd seen, and it didn't seem to clump the same way. A black sandcastle would be difficult to build. I picked the sand up, sifted it through my fingers.

We saw a little tourist hut on the opposite side of the beach and decided colas might help our mood. I noticed a sign in the sand as we walked toward the hut warning us to stay away from sea turtles. I reached up and pointed toward the sign, and just as I was about to say something my eyes landed on a dark clump some 20 feet away. My brain assembled the clump and identified the shape. A green sea turtle, about two feet long, lounging in the sun at the edge of the surf.

For me, the most of the joy of exploring new places comes from seeing the shape of the land, pondering its geologic history and the ways that history has affected human development. Robin takes her joy from other places. For her, its the animals that make a place special. And the most special animals in all of Hawai'i are the turtles that plod freely along the coast. She gasped when she saw where my fingers were pointing. She moved as close to the turtle as ecological wisdom allows and marvelled at this wild creature asleep in its natural home.

The turtle never noticed us or any of the other gawkers who passed as we watched. It shifted a flipper a time or two and slept through the afternoon.

Pictures:

Highway 11, high on the coastal slope above the island's southern shore. You gain and lose altitude quickly on Hawai'i. Here, we were less than a mile from the ocean, but nearly 500 feet up the mountain.

Looking down from a high overlook at the narrow coastal plain. The lava that formed this plain is old enough for the surface to have broken down into soil where grass grows.

Looking east from the overlook toward Whittington Park.

Notice the pimped ride also parked at the overlook. Hawaiian youth have a Californian approach to automotives. They are far more likely than kids in other places to go all Fast and Furious on a little Toyota.

A zoomed shot of the point of the lava cliff on the coastal plain.

A zoomed shot of Whittington Park. A native fishing village called Honu'apo once occupied this piece of land, but the village was destroyed in the 1868 tsunami. Sugar cane mills then took over the area, and their operators built this wharf in 1883 so they could transport their sugar to market. The 1946 tsunami destroyed the wharf and the sugar mills that had built it. Two years later, the land became a county park.

Palm trees along the cove at Whittington Park.

Tropical flowers along the side of Highway 11.

Remains of an old cinder cone just north of Highway 11 on the flanks of Mauna Loa. I've found this cone on topographical maps, but have yet to find its name.

The cove at Punalu'u Black Sand Beach.

Punalu'u black sand.

That is not a rock. It is a green sea turtle.

The turtle sleeps tonight. You can find green sea turtles in the tropical and subtropical regions of the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans. There are a few green sea turtles in Florida, and they've even been seen on the southern coast of Alaska. Green sea turtles are endangered, thanks to hunting, pollution, and habitat loss. Actual counts are hard to come by, but sources suggest there are anywhere between 200,000 and 6 million green sea turtles left in the world.

This small chicken wire fence stands around a buried nest of Hawksbill turtle eggs. Hawksbill turtles have a range similar to green sea turtles, but are far more rare and are considered critically endangered. The species seems to be declining rapidly, with a population drop of around 84% in the last three generations. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that only 15,000 nesting females exist in the world, only about 50 of whom nest in Hawai'i.

A sign explaining about Hawksbill turtles.

Green sea turtles like this one have life spans similar to humans. They can live to be about 80 years old. These turtles migrate as much as 1,500 miles between favored feeding and nesting sites.

These signs exist all along the Hawaiian coast, which is understandable when you consider how often tsunamis strike the island. I've read of significant tsunamis in 1868, 1946, 1960, and 1974. About 220 people died in Hawaiian tsunamis in the last century.

A plain stretching north from Highway 11 toward the southern flank of Mauna Loa.

Hills on the flank of Mauna Loa. These hills had a decided glacial look to me, though I know glaciers never covered this part of the island. Believe it or not, though, Hawai'i did experience a glacial period, though the glaciers only existed at the highest altitudes near the peaks of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa.

The Jeep alongside Highway 11 just north of the volcano. You can sea the smudge of south point dust on the door.