June 28 - May 18 2012 / Hawaii: Ancient Culture, Ever-Renewing Land
In Which We Visit Three Islands, and See the Transit of Venus Across the Sun
Part 3 - More Hawaii: Volcanoes and Mantas
Well, we have moved next door to the Hale Kona Kai condo, which is blessedly quiet except for the rolling and crashing of the surf almost directly below our 4th floor lanai. I have done a laundry, we have laid in cooking supplies for the next four days, and it is peaceful here.
At breakfast this morning, though, still at the horrible hotel, I had a fine conversation with Willa, 84 years old, from North Carolina, who travels all over by herself, thank you, hikes, swims, reads, drives her car, bird-watches, and generally does as she pleases, and which most things please her. J said, after she left, well, I finally heard someone who can outtalk you! She and I saw eye to eye though—grateful every day for another one.
Before we moved in here we walked up and down the strip. We went close to the water, the black rock shore, and there was a young man living up a tree, and others, barefoot and dirty, living. All colors, earnest and solemn, and not, really, a clue about it all. Bless their hearts, I wish them well. A young woman with jeans coming off her skinny hips walked up and down, looking for something. Somewhere to be. Skateboarders rolled along, so proud of themselves and so self-aware, or at least they believe they are self-aware.
We went into the first church in Hawaii, built by those missionaries come all the way here from the Park Street Church on the edge of the Boston Common. They were part of The Pioneer Company of the Sandwich Islands Mission. The first church building to stand here was a thatched affair; and the present one, of volcanic rock, was dedicated in 1837. Inside all is ohia wood, dark and cool, with a bit of garish stained glass behind the altar. A room behind the pews contains a model of the brig Thaddeus, on which those missionaries sailed, as well as some of the documents of the time—their journals and all. What damage they did, in their well-meaning way! What a great deal religions have to answer for, all around the world.
After we got into our nice rooms here, we went up the hill to get groceries, and I bought a papaya. Which I had been eating every morning for breakfast, with lime, and remembering how Aunt Marian of blessed eternal memory fed it to us, my first visit to her in California, on lovely plates with pearl-handled knives, and gave us the knives as a wedding gift afterwards. In her little patio. I thought I was in heaven, and it about killed me, in those days.
I have come a long way since then, and most everything reminds me of somewhere else. That’s not good. Maybe my words have deserted me because I am so familiar with so much of the world now, and I have already used up all the words.
Well, anyhow. We had supper on our lanai and contemplated with interest the methodically crashing waves just below. Surfers caught their rides down the beach a bit, and the sun set through the reddening sky, a little eerily this evening. I mean, it is a star, an actual star so very close to us yet like the others that seem so distant. Alex the astronomer said, forcefully, that its fluctuations are the danger to humankind, not meteors or whatever, and that we should pay attention.
So now I will get ready for tomorrow, when we go out for most of the day with the Hawaii Forests and Trails people, and maybe we will be so lucky as to See Red.
…later, that night, not being able to sleep, I went out on the lanai in the dark (well, I wish it WERE dark but people must have their “security lights”). Mysteriously, I smelled the sweetish smell of lava on the moist night air, perhaps kicked up in minute particles from the pounded volcanic rocks below? Unmistakable though, and thrilling.
And in the morning, as we had breakfast out there before our day-long excursion, schools of large brilliant yellow tangs were quite clearly visible in the surf, like pieces of kids’ discarded plastic toys, ebbing and flowing with the waves.
We were out for fourteen hours with Taj (“like the Taj Mahal” he explained), of Hawaii Forest and Trails; we did not get home until midnight, and then we sat out on our lanai over the rocks and surf and had a nightcap.
What did we see, oh what did we see? Where did we go?
First off we went to pick up some more passengers, at a preposterous resort, well-hidden from Hawaii except for the carefully maintained strips of lava flow the developers artfully left when they cleared the place. One needn’t go off-site at all for all of one’s vacation needs…here’s a Macy’s for instance. A truly nasty place.
After picking them up, and I having pounced aggressively on the chance to sit in the front seat—yes!-- we went again on the Saddle Road, that crosses the swell between two of the five volcanoes on this island. This was the drive we’d had with the failing van of Jack’s Tours, to the summit of Mauna Kea. I had a lot more confidence in Taj and Hawaii Forest and Trails, and I was excited about the day ahead of us.
It’s a sparse but lovely landscape, with grasses (turns out however an African grass, fountain grass, and it’s invasive) spraying in golden fountains amidst the lava. Again a few turkeys, and a francolin by the side of the road.
To either side, those long, long mountains, their hot hearts rising rounded above the expanse of slope on all sides, flowing so deceptively gently to the sea.
John pointed out that our geology in New England is so complex as opposed to this which is so pure and obvious, like the scheme of recycled life laid out for me to perceive so many years ago in Africa. It’s an island versus a continental geology, and, really, pretty easy to understand. There’s only one kind of rock here: imagine that!
Taj talks non-stop as we drive the Saddle Road. He tells the story of a biological control that seems—thus far—to have worked. The wiliwili tree, endemic, had a gall wasp which was destroying it (forget from whence it came). After a lot of study, another was imported from Africa which lays its own eggs in the gall of the first, and since its larvae hatch first, they eat those of the destructive wasp. Well, right, those things often look good in the beginning but do not, in the end, work out. He tells us that only 10% of the original habitat of Hawaii remains. He also says that of the 13 climactic regions of the entire world (or planet as he says), 10 are found in Hawaii—everything from desert to high-altitude and tropical rainforest and even tundra.
We stop at a roadside state park, in the dry landscape below the volcanoes, for a restroom break and to have our lunches handed out. To save time we will eat in the van on the road to Hilo, which is on the far side of the Saddle Road, on the east coast. There is a small boy on this trip, with his parents, and the little boy is already developing as a pain in the neck uncontrolled by the parents. He bugs Taj about everything and I wonder why his parents brought him on this trip. It is not my problem, fortunately, but a bratty little kid isn’t my favorite.
Taj is excited by the almost clear views of Mauna Loa. He explains that the cinder cones that march down her flanks (her name means Long Mountain) are the results of lateral eruptions from rifts; the lava wants to go where there is the least resistance and that is not any longer through a central vent, but via lateral faults along the sides.
Taj says that he has three goals for our trip, that we all be safe, that we have fun, and that we take something away with us from our experience. He says we must all take care of each other—and cites the Hawaiian concept of hana, or family, and how one addresses older people as Uncle or Auntie, as in so many other cultures. He himself is from North Carolina, but has been here a while—came for the surfing, he says, but has stayed to do other water things, I guess, and because he is enchanted by the volcanoes.
Those giant, smooth flanks accompany us all along the Saddle Road. Because this island is so young, relatively speaking, about half a million years (compared to Kauai, the oldest at five million years), and because there is so little rain on this the dry (kona) side, there is little erosion of those slopes. I had not thought of that before. But on the other side, the rainy side of the rain shadow, there are valleys, caused by erosion due to lots of rain.
I guess we will not be able to visit them on this trip, the valleys and their waterfalls and all, because somehow everything is much farther away than I had remembered, but at least when we were here 21 years ago we did walk down into beautiful Waipio Valley, the place with a glorious black beach and where the locals gave us dirty looks. Anyhow. No valleys on this side, only the large, clear landscape. Taj points out that in Hawaii one is always on a volcano, at least on its flowing flanks.
These are shield volcanoes, the lava from which contains a lesser amount of silica compared to strato volcanoes. Their lava has lots of silica and is therefore viscous, and so when it is expelled it doesn’t go very far but instead forms a cone shape at the mouth. Shield volcanoes erupt more gently and ooze rapidly (sometimes) down the sides, making this long, low and pleasing shape. He says that sometimes one can stand and watch the lava it is so slow, and other times it may be running as fast as water.
On the other end of the Saddle Road indeed the vegetation changes, quite abruptly, and there are homes with lush gardens, and trees around. Taj is taking us to a lava tube, which he says is much more satisfying than the more-famous Thurston Lava Tube in Volcanoes National Park. Flashlights are handed out. We climb down a very steep stairway amid 30-foot hanging roots, glistening rock and ferns sparkling and glittering with moisture. I am excited to do this but it turns out I can’t—he’s had me leave my stick on the van, and the footing is terribly uncertain and the flashlight almost useless. So after a couple of minutes I bow out and leave the rest of them to go on into the dark maw of the huge tunnel.
I pick my way back out and go over to the opposite entrance, which seems much easier to negotiate, and I do my own little exploration. On the smooth pahoehoe lava faces is graffiti from 1925, 1926, 1931 and more. The chaos is extreme. There are tongues of gravelly stuff, and flows of red, and the sinuous black. The ceiling drips on me. I’m happy ‘cause I’m alone.
Later, when the rest of the group come out, John tells me that I would have hated it—he said it was at his limit. They had to squat-crawl for about ten feet, and the footing was very difficult. So I don’t mind missing it. Taj says that the whole land is riddled with lava tubes, like Swiss cheese, and that you have to be very careful when you build something new on it. Good.
We start up the road to Volcanoes Park. A fearsome road really, with kipuka here and there amidst the horrible lava. A kipuka is Hawaiian for what I call a refugium, a place spared by the lava for some reason, and thus as it was before the eruption, and not overcome. These are seed banks, and also places with genetic pressure to diversify. Like widely-separated mountain tops, or islands, these may be places in which, say, a tiny insect evolves into a slightly different insect from its former sibling in another kipuka. Taj uses a fruit fly as a nice example; I am sure that no one else in the van knows as I do that fruit flies are used in genetics experiments because they breed true and breed fast. I remember the blue- and brown- eyed fruit flies of my college biology class.
How did stuff—living stuff—get to these islands? Wind, water, wings, explain Taj. Nicely done. One new species in 100,000 years, he says. He’s very excited about all this and although I don’t especially like him, I certainly respect his enthusiasm and his knowledge and love of the place and not only its mechanics but its fineness.
There’s pahoehoe, which flows hotter and thus forms a kind of pudding-skin on top and what’s underneath undulates and curls the skin, and a’a, which is cooler and thus crystallizes more, into those deadly jagged knife-edge chaotic piles. All mixed up together.
At the summit we view Pu’u O’o crater which as we saw the other day on our own hike, though not as close, is steaming and venting mightily. From this vantage we can see how huge its hole is. Taj gave us some statistics, but I only care about seeing its round, dreadful hole, and the hole within that, and the one within that one, and then the ghastly edge of the final hole whence issues the gassy steam and sulfur cloud, which is carried away on the wind.
There’s a nice little walk for us, first through the rain forest, where Taj tells about all the plants. Much of it I know in some form or other, and but it is confusing of course to try to visualize the Hawaiian names for things. There is a nasty invasive ginger, pretty but with thick, powerful roots and rhizomes by which it powers its way underground. A bamboo orchid, one of only three native orchids on the island. There are ohia trees in their many forms, and the uluhe fern which spreads everywhere and which has an elegant purple fiddlehead. He knows them all and all about them as I do at home. There’s a very tall clubmoss which looks exactly like one at home but so much bigger.
He explained that since there are no herbivores the plants have evolved to lose their protective adaptations: thornless briers (he shows us), stingless nettle (he shows us). Later on the long drive home in the dark he and I talk a little about so, ok, what does the plant use that unused energy for? John and I talk about it some too. I say, it’s the low-rent district here. But I think they turn it into size, that energy not needed for protection, for so many plants that are small at home are large here.
The little kid is constantly pestering him and his mother says, cheerfully and ineffectively, Leave Taj alone! At one point we are just a few feet from a totally unprotected 400 foot drop and the kid is cavorting around; I grab him and hold onto him, since both his mother and father seem oblivious. We walk alongside ominously steaming vents, and I don’t see why Taj and I have to be the ones to monitor the kid.
Taj tells us that some of this is a so-called upside down rainforest, because the ohia and koa trees do not form a big canopy, thus leaving a forest floor with good sunlight and therefore more diversity compared to most forests. I can see this; the understory is thick and varied and the canopy, such as there is, is scrawny and sparse.
There’s Sulfur Banks, similar to places in Yellowstone, sickening bright yellow, red, lavender. Steaming and venting. Someone has left a ti-leaf wrapped offering right on a yellowed, burning rock. Taj tells us how more than once careless people have been boiled or steamed here: a horror.
All the “land” beneath our heedless feet seethes with fire and death!
After our walk we drive down Chain of Craters Road. Kilauea has been erupting constantly since 1983, more or less, and the most recent eruptions, within the last few years, have completely changed the park, so that for instance you can’t any more drive around Rim Drive, or hike the Halemaumau Trail (which we did in 1991) . As far as one can see it is black, all the way to the ocean. Relentless, implacable, unstoppable, completely powerful no matter how technologically clever we think we are. I love it.
We stop by the roadside and Taj takes us first to walk among the 1969 clinkers and flows; he shows us various kinds of lava: rainbow lava from a trick of the light and the chemistry; Pele’s oval teardrops; weightless hair-like stuff. Then across the road to a “secret” place where there is a dreadful crack! uplifting the land, and just beyond it a vast frighteningly deep pit. Do Not Cross This Line, Taj warns. This is a place where the weight of the lava has caused the land to sink. Wonderfully, there are bees which have built hives down inside its walls.
And then we are down the mountain, as far as you can go, to the ocean. To where the lava has poured into the ocean, leaving sheer black cliffs pounded by surf. And so the surf reduces, eventually, this new rock into sand, and that sand is deposited somewhere, and perhaps rides a plate down again, and returns to magma, and so it begins again.
The picky walk to see the thrashing surf takes us over pahoehoe and a’a and back, and on the way back to the van I discover a large, elegant lily-like plant, just there growing strongly in the black. I leave an ahu of three light-colored stones, Namaste, take a picture. I acknowledge you, power of life in the most improbable places. Weeds, beetles, rats: all you opportunistic organisms.
There is dinner at the end-of-the-road shelter by lantern light (the end because it is covered further on by lava). A red-shirted and filthy Japanese team is just heading out to see the current flow, probably without having watched the continuous-loop Park Service video about how to prepare and take care of yourself if you want to hike in to See Red. We learn that at present it’s three hours across the old lava.
Taj shows us his videos of his prideful close approach to Pu’u O’o, which he does in the dark when no one is there to stop him (scary). Just as we pack up to leave to go back up to the summit, through binoculars I can see several red smears on a very distant hillside: lava flowing NOW. I look at it for a while; it’s the closest I will get to it, and I am regretful since I had so hoped I would get to see it more closely—but at least there it is. Taj emphasizes how hard the hiking would be, across the fierce linker and ropey lava, in the dark no less. Yeah, yeah, I get that. But still, still…
In the dark we drive back up to the summit for the glow of Pu’u O’o, and the glittering night sky, and a globular cluster there, and a shooting star tearing right across the field. Inquisitive species that we are, several hundred people gather here in the dark, some with flashlights but many just feeling their way, talking quietly, taking pictures and sometimes a flash, to see the redness of fire for ourselves. I love it that the Park Service permits this. People would take matters into their own paws anyhow, if they didn’t. Somewhere I heard that when there is active lava to be seen, the island empties to right here to see it, and people come from the other islands, too.
It’s a long, long drive home now, in the dark, and Taj puts on some quiet music, and back we go, down from the summit, across the Saddle Road again, and down the coast, which is sprinkled with sodium vapor lights (to protect night skies). He drives briskly and I joke, there in the front seat next to him, that at least he doesn’t have to worry about hitting a deer or a moose. We have a small amount of conversation, after he canvasses everyone to see if they have now got something to take away with them. It is midnight when we get home.
I think the deepest learning that I have right now is that here I am seeing the whole landscape as far as I can turn my head in both directions. When we came to Hawaii before, I saw places. This time, I am seeing a Place, and a process.
This morning we drove up the volcano flank (you are always on a volcano in Hawaii, in all the islands, no matter if it is the oldest—Kauai—or the youngest—here on Hawaii) just above Kailua Kona to visit a coffee plantation. It turns out not quite what I expected. It’s a family farm, award-winning for its organic Kona coffee—only coffee grown within a 22 mile radius of here can be called Kona coffee. There’s a casual little shed at the entrance, where you are urged to sample, and to sit at picnic tables with the several indolent domestic cats, and wait for the tour person. Some videos are shown, from various tv programs, each showing a bit different take on the process, which is more complicated than I had known.
Our tour guide shows up. She’s a tough bitch-lady, called Judy, and John says, at the end of her spiel, that she could sell knives at a fair—or probably iceboxes to Eskimos. She’s thin and muscular, brown, and brooks no nonsense, either on her tour or her farming practices. She tells us a lot, shows us some coffee trees just across the road (a black and white cat insinuating himself around them), shows us the red ripened berries, called cherries, explains how the trees are cossetted and cared for, how they mustn’t be allowed to get too tall, so as to facilitate hand-picking, and so on.
Then she takes us into the mill where we see some beans which have been stripped of their red covers and fermented, how they are going through a size-sorting process in a clever machine much like something an archeologist would use to sift through dirt for tiny treasures. Next, to the roasting room though nothing is being roasted at the moment, and then to, of course, the gift shop where there are not only a lot of different kinds of coffee (over $30 a pound) but other goodies; I restrain myself although the chocolate-covered macadamias are alluring. We slither away, and back down the hill to our nest above the rocks and water.
We have a nap, to the sound of the waters crashing below our window.
And then tonight! To the Manta Rays! The Manta Rays!!
After some toing and froing and some difficult navigating, we get to the Sea Paradise store, in a shopping mall (since their water-front store was destroyed by the Japanese tsunami), get fitted for wetsuits, and make our way to the little boat that’ll take us to the Rays.
The boat is small and not very crowded, and John who has been nervous about all this, since he has some various problems with snorkeling, is reassured by the nice young woman who talks to us a while, learning from us about eclipses and all. They tool us around the waterfront a bit, marking time really--there’s been no sunset actually to see since Transit Day as all has been overcast most days.
Then it’s time. We all suit up and they explain the drill, which is very ingenious: there’s a kind of raft attached to the back of the boat, floating free, and we are to make our ways to it and hang on, outstretched arm to arm, perhaps a dozen people on each side, and look into the water. There are lights on the bottom of the raft, and so we can see in.
Once everybody is settled, I find a man on my left who is shivering uncontrollably, so much so that I ask if he is ok, and John to my right (the young woman puts him there next to me when he gets in the water, bless her). John and I hold hands now and again, and squeeze companionably and reassuringly.
I had thought the water would be cold, but it really isn’t, just more like a swimming pool. I am perfectly happy there, hanging on to the little raft next to John and the shivering man on my left, looking into the green-blue water below, which is alive with plankton in the light. They like the light, the planktons do, so they come to it, and the Rays come to them to eat them.
I wait patiently, perfectly happy. Then Here he comes! Calls one of our guides, and there not far below me a gigantic and gorgeous creature glides into view, black and patterned on his back and creamy brilliant white on his belly, and his long black narrow tail. He’s as big as a sofa! Everybody shrieks and I am so glad because I want John to have something good from this, and there it is.
Then in a while a couple of others fly gracefully below, and I know they are coming because I can hear people who’re hanging from the rafts of other boats, nearby, shrieking with delight. I think there are about three rafts out here.
Nothing more happens for a while, but I am content with what I have seen. People are getting a little chilly. The guides, who are in the water with us and attentively checking everybody out, tow the raft to different spots. We wait. I don’t mind waiting. I am content to see the plankton boiling in the water column, and the other fish, large shadowy gray ones not too far below, here and there.
Just as I’m thinking, well, we should call it a night, o lord, here they all are! At least three at once, gliding so elegantly and languidly through the water, coming so very close to us that I feel I could reach out and touch them, their peculiar bony or cartilaginous maws wide open so we can see into their very innards, and at the last moment nonchalantly curving their great wings round so as to miss us. They do this over and over, like ballet I heard one woman say later, and the people are thrilled and I am thrilled. So hauntingly lovely. Maybe like prehistoric birds or birdish creatures, gliding and soaring and eating. I love their marvelously-patterned backs and the extreme whiteness of their spotted bellies, and the rows of gill rakers on their bellies, so neatly arranged. One of them has a traveler, a remora, attached to her belly, coasting along on the wild free ride.
Thank you lord for letting me snorkel one MORE time AND for letting me see these fine animals for myself!
This morning early, well fairly early so as it wouldn’t be too hot, we drove briefly up the road to the Kaoloko-Honokohau National Historic Park, where some things of ancient Hawaii have been mercifully preserved against the developers. Nobody much is there, nobody even knows about this park, we find. There is a young ranger person and she sends us off on the trails.
It’s a hard walk! We walk through sand on the pepper and salt beach (a handful of sand contains a multitude of stories, both organic and inorganic), along lava trails, to the water where we see sea turtles at last, some in the water and brief glimpses of them, and later two on the beach nestled together, hanging out in the sun. There are some surfers who have carried their boards across the lava trails BAREFOOT. There are some fine trees with lumpy large green fruit and some wasps and huge black bees on them. Some parrots, a flock of noisy parrots. There is a reconstructed long house. It seems the island was divided into long strips, mauka to makai, so that no one group had all the good stuff nor all the hard stuff. I recall some other, perhaps ancient European culture, had the same arrangement, very sensible.
We observe the turtles, we take pictures, we drink, we walk in the heat, we ponder how they could ever have lived here in this precarious place, with its constant uncertainties. Later, back at the modest visitors’ center, we learn from the ranger about the effects of the recent tsunami from Japan, how things were carried here to these shores from across the Pacific. It occurs to me that this has been happening ever since these islands were here five million years ago! Nothing new, nothing at all. Each wave would have brought things from other places, and so the islands were populated with new life.
It’s all very old, here, but in some ways so simple. So easy to understand. I realize that an archeologist trying to learn about the ancient Hawaiians would have a terrible time because without warning historic sites would be covered by lava, and never known of nor seen. Successive layers of history, blanketed forever. After all, downslope from Mauna Kea there’s a whole modern subdivision now covered by lava: people’s houses and their things, their memories, covered forever by Pele.
We sit on our nice lanai, having our last drinkies here, and watch the chaos in the water below, and recall the chaos of the clinkers we walked over. The water is less chaotic really than the lava, I think. But all of it is chaotic. Except maybe the slope of repose; that’s predictable.