I know I'm merely echoing a parental cliche today when I say I really can't believe that Thomas, my little Bubby, is turning five. I looked at him a few days again and said to Nate, "When the heck did he get so huge?" As people, we're aware of the passage of time and yet our children seem to be always be the age that they are, if that makes any sense, and we can hardly remember when they were smaller, nor imagine them bigger.
Thomacito, my burrito, my favorite monkeyhead, my bubby wubby and my schnoot...I'm crying as I write this. I love you so much. You are such a big boy now and I see you headed out to conquer the world. You are fearless and generous, gregarious and hilarious. You are the only you and I'm so grateful to be your mommy.
Happy Birthday.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
The Poulsens Went to Hawaii and All I Got Were These Lousy Blog Posts
I kept this diary during our recent weeklong trip to Hawaii. I will also be posting some pics along with the entries just as soon as I can get them all organized!
-Mara
Chasing the Afternoon
We boarded the plane about 1:30 pm. Despite the cool drizzle of rain we’d had on the way to the airport, it was sunny now, brilliantly so as we squashed into our ridiculously small coach seats. When we take off the sun is a beacon of immense potency ahead of us, reflecting off voluminous and voluptuous rolling cloud hills.
It will stay that way for 11 hours.
I thought about the stories where a man chases the rainbow for its pot of gold and how he must pursue it without looking directly at it because if he looks, the rainbow will appear to be as far away from him as when he started. So it was with our afternoon. We could never catch it. Across five thousand miles, six time zones, land and ocean, we chased it. The clouds were the land we tracked it over, sometimes generally flat but gently rippled, like fields of the Midwest, other times bulky and spiked with sudden drop-offs into open valleys like the Wasatch Mountain range where I grew up. We flew fast and free over our terrain, but the sun kept ahead of us and like Icarus we groped and groped toward it and eventually fell—touching down in Hawaii in defeat.
And we were really were defeated then. As we descended the sun was growing pink and distant, the cloud volcanoes—grand cones of them erupting out of otherwise flat cloud fields—above Honolulu serving to hide it. We touched down, deplaned and headed for the baggage claim. Behind us the afternoon ended and, in barely a few minutes, it was dark.
Capitalism, the Scourge and Savior of Hawaii, Part One
This morning, we left the hotel and headed hand in hand down toward the beach which the hotel’s website had promised was a mere twenty-five yards away. I had seen the ocean from the balcony of our hotel room, its placid blue speckled with tiny whitecaps, and thought that maybe we could grab a spot on the beach, break out the books, and spend a relaxing morning acknowledging our feebleness to its immenseness. Why is it that recognizing how much more great and powerful nature is compared to us results in a feeling of pure contentment? Something to explore later, maybe, when we hit Volcano National Park.
Only the beach proved just about as elusive as the sun had yesterday and the resort area with all its tiny shops in bright colors that had looked so cute from our balcony turned out to be teaming with parasites. Five minutes into our walk, we were accosted by an otherwise harmless looking woman in a sundress and enormous eighties hair who wanted to know all about us, where we were from, how long we were here, what kind of things did we want to see and did we know she could get us discounts to things, why didn’t we step inside, etc. Our spider scam sense that New York hammered into us should have immediately kicked in, but hey, this was Hawaii, we were happy to be wandering down to the beach, she looked so nice, blah blah blah. We told her we had come here by taxi, but were looking to rent a car for the remainder of the week and did she know if there was a rental place nearby or did we have to go back to the airport? “You have to go back to the airport,” she said, “but I live right by there. I’d be happy to take you. When do you want to go?”
Scam alert! Scam alert! We told her we were on our way to get some breakfast, but we’d be back up this way later. She said, “There are a lot of people like me down the beach who’ll try to talk to you. Just tell them that Diane is helping you, okay?” I was already hard tugging Nate out of there—I’m a total misanthrope, I admit it. I hadn’t come to Hawaii to chat up strangers. I think she guessed I was the less friendly of the two of us because she weakly tried to win me over by shouting after us, “You have such pretty hair!”
In only one sense did she end up telling us the whole truth—she was absolutely right than this little stretch of otherwise adorable open-air shops and restaurants was overrun by “people like her”. We spotted a sign for a deal on luau tickets and the instant I pointed it out to Nate another Diane-type popped up. “Now the luau tickets are normally 72 per person, but I can get that down to 28 for both of you together,” she said. “And there is snorkeling over at the Kona Resort bay—you can see Green Sea Turtles there—and we can get you set up with all the equipment. And are you going to the volcano? We’ve got a great deal on the airplane tours, that’s the only good way to see it, you know…”
So what did Diane and her many prototypes want with us for these amazing deals? Just a few minutes of our time, really, a small price to pay, just come to our presentation about a timeshare option, no high pressure sales tactics we promise, and then you can have the rest of the week to do these fun things which we will give you for practically nothing! You have such pretty hair!
I think it is possible to get a good deal out of a timeshare buy. Nate’s parents did it for years, but it requires you to deal with a constant barrage of pressure to buy more more more. Like I said, I’m a misanthrope. When I go on vacation, I go to be alone (or in this case, to be with just Nate who, with work and school, is normally gone all but eight days out of the month).
But then again, all of these other things they were hawking really were more expensive on their own. Wouldn’t it be reasonable to go to a little sales tour, reject the pitch, and then get all these great discounts?
I’m a big fan of Capitalism—I think other more communal economic ideals sound great on paper, but in practice become coercive and stagnant. Free markets are the best and only way people can build their own wealth and that freedom has turned America into the wealthiest nation on earth, but it made me more than a little grumpy to spend the first few hours of our vacation trying to navigate the maze of “marketing representatives” who, like the jumping spiders Thomas loves, had staked themselves in the obvious path of their prey and then waited to spring.
But what about the luau, an event I had wanted to do before the sticker shock of a timeshare-presentation-free price hit me? Do we try to trick the timeshare troopers on their own turf to wrangle a good deal or we do we shell out the big bucks? Which is more valuable, I asked Nate, our time or our money? Which option makes us feel the least like suckers?
I don’t know what it’s like to be native Hawaiian. I suspect for those living here now, it’s like being anyone else with an interesting historical background that has little effect on your current way of life, but then again, maybe not. Unlike most other “interesting historical backgrounds”, Old Hawaii is still here, encased in a time capsule, and it only costs 72 bucks per slack-jawed tourist to catch a glimpse of it.
Supposedly, anyway. As much as I want to see fire and hula dancing and a full roasted pig, the idea of a luau turned poisonous to me the longer I listened to these timeshare parasites hawk their discounts to it. I know there are real luaus in Hawaii, but they are private affairs, and a Hawaiian-shirt-wearing tourist can’t purchase his/her way into them—wedding luaus, birthday party luaus (bar mitzvah luaus?!?!?).
Capitalism has saved Old Hawaii in a way. I asked Nate last night if the Hawaiian language is a bit like the various Gaelic dialects in the British Isles, living on for nostalgia’s sake and because there are people like us who have fetishized it and crave a piece of it and are willing to pay for it.
How do you preserve a cultural heritage without selling it? And how do you separate nostalgia from history? Would Old Hawaii still feel as vibrant here if there weren’t tourists to feed it? Is that a good or bad thing? And how much of it is real?
At a wedding reception a few years back, I ran into a fellow from Ireland and got a chance to gush about how I just loved Ireland and how wonderful it was even though I had never had a chance to be there and he replied sullenly, “You don’t love Ireland. You love what you think Ireland is. All you Americans think Ireland is this lovely green magical place, but it’s not. The cities are dirty and stinky and the country is poor.” That was pretty much the end of the conversation.
I don’t think that Hawaii much fits the description of the angry Irishman, but how much of that is from wrapping some romanticized version of its past into a package palatable and priced well for tourist consumption?
Nate and I never did do the luau. The timeshare discount vs. full-price admission turned out to be a zerosum game for us. Either the timeshare people win or the luau marketers do. Instead, we drove about twenty miles north to a pristine and wildly expensive shopping center at Mauna Lani because at 7 pm every night, there is a free hula performance by Traditions Hawaii. In the midst of this tightly stylized pedmall disguised as a Hawaiian village, we watched a dance recreation of King Kamehameha’s secret birth and rise to power among the Hawaiian tribes. It was simple, the dancing was fantastic, and it was only briefly interrupted by a bizarre English pop song performance by the lead that some moron probably thought was necessary to keep the unwashed American masses interested. Was it authentic? Who can say? It was authentic to what Hawaii is now, tourist and tradition intertwined, the two symbiotes feeding and sustaining each other. Afterwards, the viewing audience toured the shops in the compound, which is probably the main reason the performance was free. Nate and I bought some crackers, cheese, and dried mango from the over-priced grocery store and headed home.
Mara vs. the Volcano
It’s raining tremendously here, but without wind, so I can sit on the hotel balcony, listen to it pounding down, smell the salty residue of an ocean rain. We will be in Hilo today where it has rained every day of the week. The storms blow in from the east and cannot climb Mauna Loa, the Big Island’s grim volcanic summit glowering more than 13000 feet over the rest of the us, so most of the time it drops all its rain on the eastern side, which incidentally is where Kilauea, Hawaii’s last constantly exploding monster has been spewing since 1983. Fire and water, natural enemies, imprisoned on the same piece of the island together.
The volcano is our ultimate destination today, but we started on the Kona side of Big Island, the touristy beach capital where we chose our hotel, partially to escape Hilo’s rain. But that means that in order to see the volcano and to come back home again, we will have to round the entire island in a day—almost a 300 mile round trip—on the Big Island’s single circuit highway which winds sinuously around the perimeter, climbing from sea level beachfronts to 3000 foot elevations and then back down again, all the while twisting like a canyon road and sometimes dropping down to 35 mile an hour speed limits. A scenic way, but not one for getting places in a hurry.
We stop for breakfast at a tiny roadside café that looks like a rickety shack on the outside, but is surprisingly lovely on the inside. It is perched above a cliffside that plunges at least a hundred feet below us over the side, but what a fragrant ride down it would be. The rise is overrun with flowers, long cones of them in red and white, and there is even an avocado tree hanging heady and fully ripe only a few yards away. I love that in Hawaii, all the restaurants are open air. There is no reason to have walls—it just never gets cold enough. It felt a little deviant to me the first day here, that everything is just open and anything can wander in. I’m used to barriers and it challenges my natural inclination toward safety.
Speaking of anything wandering in, a tiny green gecko is climbing the wooden beam near our table. My heart thumps. How much I miss Thomas! He would have loved to see this adorable little lizard sunning himself barely a foot or two away. I have to sneak close and take his picture. I take a video, too, so that when we get home Thomas can see how it looks and moves. I wish I could take something like this home for him. He’s a touchy kid—a flat screen of moving pictures is totally inadequate. He likes texture and weight. Asking him not to touch is like asking him not to breathe.
The food is also surprisingly elegant—silky papaya stuffed with apples and pineapple in a cream sauce and toasted coconut and Nate’s eggs benedict which are served on little crisp biscuits and artistically dripped with hollandaise. Everything we’ve paid for so far in Hawaii has been ridiculously priced and the prices here are as high as elsewhere, but for once, the food actually approaches “worth it”. The single waitress is an older white woman in ragged jeans and a halter top, with long blond hair just loose. She looks like a hippy who just wandered in once and never left. She is pleasant and has a calm glow about her, like the rest of this place.
Back on the road, we don’t have a real schedule, except to reach the volcano by early afternoon, so we decide to stop wherever sounds interesting. We pull off next at Pu’uhonua o Honaunau, the last “Place of Refuge” in Hawaii that the National Park Service has managed to preserve. Apparently in the old Hawaiian religion, kapu was code of conduct—mostly acts that were taboo—so severe that managing to even accidentally break one of its laws meant death. And considering the laws—women can’t eat with men, you can’t walk too close to a chief or even cast your shadow on him, etc.—the chance of breaking one accidentally seemed pretty high. Fearing the gods would punish them if they harbored a law-breaker, the people would chase you until they either caught and killed you, or you reached a place of refuge where the bones of old chiefs are buried and blood cannot be spilt. The priest would absolve of your crime and you could go home again—at least until the next time your shadow fell in an inconvenient direction, sinner!
“Let’s build a wall to protect ourselves from our own ludicrous system of justice!” I snarked to Nate while we toured the grounds. They say that Louis XVI of France had a extreme code of politeness at his palace gatherings—you had to scratch at the door to be let in, you couldn’t knock, etc.—in order to keep his nobles so occupied with etiquette that they couldn’t plot against him. Unfortunately for Louis, it was the peasants who ended up plotting against him, and peasants don’t get invited to those kind of parties.
Unsurprisingly, most of the kapu rules focused on women and what we could and couldn’t do. What is it about us, men? We don’t spend our time coming up with rules that are for you and you only. I mean, yes, you have to pick up your socks and use a coaster, but so does everyone else.
Weirdly, though, one of the laws was that a woman couldn’t cook a meal for a man. Who came up with this rule? Maybe you could also forbid us to do your laundry? I have a few more things on my list that I could be forbidden from. My guess is that for this reason alone the whole kapu business eventually went out of favor. How many years of cooking their own dinners before the Hawaiian men chased the original rule-maker himself all the way to Pu’uhonua o Honaunau? “And stay there,” they sniffed, walking back home to a warm meal.
There was also this guy at the National Park Service site. Nate tried to ask him a question and he barely looked up response. We’re not quite sure if he was actually supposed to be there as a part of the exhibit. Maybe the lightweight NPS rangers were too afraid to ask him to leave. I would be.
Sea turtles are swimming in the shallows here. We get as close as we dare and rapidly snap pictures.
Back on the road. We stop at a cliffside where the wind is rushing violently across the beach and up the hill. It is covered in lush vegetation and the waves below are smashing majestically against the land. Someone is flying foam airplanes on the hillside—we can see the planes but not the people. They look like a flock of some strange local bird.
“Black sand beaches!” I yell at Nate about two seconds before we miss the turnoff to Punalu’u. We have already passed the southernmost tip of Big Island and are working our way up the opposite side now toward Volcano National Park. Nate yells, “Where?!” even as he is slamming the breaks and careening the car around. We bounce onto the exit, our little rental car kicking up in the back like a donkey (Hi Alamo Rental Car Service!), but manage to not to go skidding off the road. We wind down to the beachfront which, unlike almost everything else here in Hawaii, has no entrance fee. People are just parking and getting out. The only real sign says it’s illegal to remove any of the sand from the beach. I don’t really know why until I get a chance to stand on it.
Obsidian. The most beautiful of volcanic rock. What looks like a long swath of mud leading down the water is, in fact, miniscule shards of obsidian, so miniscule that they look like glistening grains of black salt in your hand. The sand is soft under the feet, like any sand, only it’s dark and shiny. I sift it through my fingers in wonder. Nate tries to scratch our initials where the surf has soaked it but he can’t finish fast enough for me to take a picture before the foamy sea obliterates it. He manages to build a little mini-Volcano, though, and we cap it with a fallen yellow flower. Then in comes the water again and sluices the whole thing away.
Finally, Volcano National Park. We’ve come up the Hilo (eastern) side of the island now and into its rain. A fine warm mist is coating the car (and us) as we make our way to the visitor’s center.
All I want—all I have wanted for this whole trip—is to see lava flowing. We rejected the overpriced air tours because we want to see it for ourselves, if we can, hiking as close to the molten earth as we can get and with no panes of glass between it and us (okay and prop plane rides like that make me soooooo motion sick, even when I’m well-drugged. Last thing I want to be doing over the Volcano is erupting myself. Everyone together now, “Ewwwww…”).
Inside we stumble into the park ranger telling a group of hikers that up until a month ago, the only way to see the lava was the take one of those plane rides, but the lava has changed direction and is now actually running into the sea just east of here. The only way to get there is to drive up highway 11 for twenty miles, turn onto highway 130 for another twenty miles and go on past the roadblock at the end of it, follow the remaining gravel road to a small parking area, then break out the flashlights and cross the old lava flows to the sea where, in the near distance, molten rock and water are violently clashing, throwing steam and stone sometimes thirty feet in the air.
It’s easiest to see the lava after dark, so we have time to drive up to Hilo for the last event on our semi-itinerary: eat the very last cheap food left in Hawaii, the Loco Moco. Café 100 is one of Hilo’s oldest fast food joints, having been around since the 50’s. It’s named for Hawaiian’s 100th Battalion from WWII, a battalion full of Japanese soldiers. The Loco Moco is its own invention: a hamburger patty topped with an local island egg over white rice and smothered in brown gravy. Does this sound like Nate food or what? It costs a measly $1.99. We have seen Loco Moco imitations around here in Kona, but their price hovers somewhere between $5 and $9. Not only do we want to try the real thing, but we’re also tired of feeling like suckers every time we break open our wallets.
We know we’ve reached the island’s biggest town because of the Wal-Mart. And three MacDonald’s, all within a two mile radius of each other. Aside from the main strip, though, Hilo is almost all squat little island houses: single-story with steeply tilted, corrugated roofs. We drive through them to Café 100 which looks like it’s still in the original 50’s building (it isn’t: tsunamis destroyed two earlier Café 100’s before this one was built). The café is rough-hewn and looks like any roadside pit stop serving fast food. They have about ten different Locos on the menu, including a salmon tempura loco that I order. Nate gets the real thing. We eat them at one of the many picnic-style benches around the perimeter. My egg is overcooked, but Nate’s is just right: he draws a line through the center of it and thick, wet yolk oozes out to cover everything. I’ve seldom seen him happier.
It’s a little after 4:30 pm by the time we’re grinding the rental car over the gravel road (Hi again Alamo Rental Car Service!) to the lava site. The road is so tight that any car trying to come the other way has to negotiate a careful waltz with us—one tire this way, one tire that, spin your partner around and then go! We find a place in the parking lot where rangers are handing out flyers with safety tips on them. I’m still blown away that they even try to let people do this, what with the tort-happy union we live in. Out on the newest lava flows, the benches are completely unstable. Recently 43 acres disappeared into the ocean overnight. One wrong step and you’ll go plunging into the abyss with it. Not to mention the sulfur dioxide in the air which is toxic even to the average healthy person, let alone anyone who already has breathing problems. The rangers have set up markers to show the best way along the lava flow, but there’s nothing to force you to stay with them. Good luck intrepid tourist! Hope you come back alive!
In the distance, smoke and steam are spurting up in great clouds. The air is practically sizzling—I can see the heat waves warping the black hills behind us. We pick our way delicately over the ripples of cooled magma. This whole area feels delicate, like a frozen pond, that any moment this thin surface could crack and we’d take a sudden and very hot bath.
We reach the end of the bench. Although there is lava flow still beyond us, about an eighth of a mile’s worth that reaches the sea, that part is new lava flow and not likely able to carry the weight of a few hundred tourists tromping back and forth across it day in and day out. We crawl up on a near rock outcropping to better see the clouds of steam that are shooting up from the water about five hundred yards away from us. No lava is immediately visible, but the afternoon is still bright and if there are flows they are too thin to make a dent in the sunlight. Until—there! In the distance the black shore cracks and the earth’s red blood spurts out. Everyone oohs and ahhs and a cacophony of camera clicks follow. We try to take a picture of it, but our little camera barely has a zoom factor of 3. We get a great picture of the steam clouds and what looks like an artifact of red on an otherwise dark field.
For a long time, that is all there is.
Nate and I find a roll of pumice to still on and wait for sunset. A few feet away from us a little boy is tossing lumps of it, watching parts of them disintegrate into dust when they hit. His father comes by to tell him to stop. He stops for a moment until the father wanders away again and then he picks up another and throws it. He’s turned toward us now, completely unconscious of the people around him. The next rock he lobs lands at my feet. His father is back, grabbing his arm and telling him in a harsh whisper that if he doesn’t cut it out, they are going right out of here and there’ll be no lava for him, now quit it! His mother glances sharply over here, too. “Stop that or the park ranger will arrest you and throw you in jail,” she says offhandedly to her son. Nate and I have to snicker behind our hands. Whenever Thomas is doing something even semi-dangerous, I find myself saying whatever possible to get him to stop. “That’s a good way to lose your head!” I’ll say, to which Nate will add, “Yeah and then you’ll have to get a monkey head.” I don’t think I’ve ever threatened him with arrest and possible jail time, though.
The sun is going down so we crawl back up onto the edge of bench as lots of people are arriving by now and we want a good viewing spot. Here and there little bits of red are starting to appear across the otherwise empty field. Unlike our flight to Honolulu, the sun seems to be taking an abysmally slow time to set. But the steam clouds are turning crimson. Now and then the wind will shift a bit and blow them away from the land and there…the shoreline is awash in lava. Wounded, it drips its blood into the sea and the sea explodes. An awe and terror quite unlike anything I’ve ever felt is making my heart beat fast. My chest feels light and hollow, my lungs not quite able to fill up.
All around us, Hawaiians have tossed offerings to Pele, their volcano god that lives in Kilauea: leis and leaf-wrapped bundles. A collective shout goes up from the bench as one daring grandmother is being escorted by a Civil Defense policeman out on the new flow—the one the rangers ordered us never to step foot on—toward the lava. I hear someone saying the Lord’s Prayer behind me. They stop roughly a hundred yards from the lava. Grandmother raises her arms in the air, appears to be chanting. The bench here is quiet, people whispering back and forth. She tosses the lei she has brought and they start back toward us. When they reach the bench, there is a collective sigh of relief.
At last the sun is gone and although everyone around us is raucous with excitement, talking and taking pictures, Nate and I are quiet. He has taken the advice of a photographer near us and is resting the camera on a flattened part of our backpack, pressing the timer then letting it go. But no camera can really capture what it looks like from this high slope above the lava fields. In the dark, the lava is livid. You can actually see the different shades of it as it oozes through the stone of its own make, a shifting pattern of red and yellow and orange, liquid fire on the hunt. For over thirty years it has groped its way toward the sea from Kilauea’s angry mouth. The water hisses and spits at it, then erupts into great mushroom clouds of steam. You feel like if the ocean weren’t so very vast, the lava would have gobbled it up already. Thomas, fascinated by fire like any little kid, wanted to know if there were any fires that water can’t put out. I said yes, of course, and talked to him about grease fires and big forest fires, but this is the real fire. I wish desperately that he could see it. The water seems to be no match here—and yet, like the Union side of the Civil War, survives to triumph on sheer numbers. Down, down the lava drips and the greatness of the ocean devours it at last. The glow dies out and black stone is all that is left. Fire and water. Both win, both lose.
We have a great spot here on the bench—our view is obscured by nothing—and so eventually we decide we ought to give it up to someone else. My leg has fallen asleep. Nate helps me down and we have to break out the flashlights from our pack to pick our way back across the lava flow in the dark. Behind us, the sky is alight, enormous crimson clouds rolling away. The sound of the sea shushing back and forth against the shore is constantly broken up by the erupting hiss of steam. We are lucky to be able to turn our backs on that ancient battle and go home. I doubt we’ll ever see its like again.
Catching up
After our Big Island adventure yesterday, today is a lazy day. We sleep in (until 6:30 am! This is an improvement over yesterday where we woke up at 5 am. We just can’t shake this Jersey time. Helps us get on the road, though) and grab breakfast a beachfront buffet, but I feel grumpy all over again. The buffet is $8 a person and consists of some hard breakfast burritos, sloppy eggs, freezer-style hashbrowns, and dried-out biscuits. Drinks are extra and limited to a single refill. I’m beginning to feel like my mother-in-law who went grocery shopping with me last Thursday. She had just come from Mexico and made sounds of distress every time she confronted a price tag. My instinct is that ordinarily things in Hawaii cannot possibly cost this much, but that, like anywhere, the tourists are too easy a target. They are also serving a Loco Moco here. It costs $10.
We give in the price-gouging spirit, though, and go shopping along the Kailua-Kona shore. I get a little artificial flower hairclip for a not-too-terrible amount, despite the fact the clip-part is just hot-glued onto the silk flower. Nate wanders into a natural wood open air market and calls me over. We tour the carvings and bump into the owner, a fit tan guy in his forties who is wearing only a pair of board shorts and shell necklace. An old surfer dude who set up shop on his favorite shore. Everything is hand-carved here and there are painted pieces of extraordinary workmanship and even more extraordinary price tags. We find an unpainted piece—an intertwined male and female figure—that looks like it would fit in among other things at home. There are two styles: Nate wants to get the more “voluptuous” one, but I veto it. She looks a little cold to me.
We take a long afternoon nap—the humidity and the heat make sleep deep and delicious. When we wake up, it’s late in the afternoon and we have only one destination left: Sushi En Fuego a Japanese-Spanish fusion restaurant right on the beach. We’re hoping to see the sunset—every night we’ve been here so far, we’ve been off doing something and didn’t have a chance to see the sun go down over the ocean. No luck this time, either, though. The sky is clouded over. There is barely a pink sheen to it as darkness descends.
We eat sushi and tapas and listen to the water lapping right under the balcony. The table umbrellas come down and the tiki torches flare up. Nate sighs. “Every man, everywhere, wants his own tiki lounge,” he says. This strikes me as absolute truth if there is any.
Bachelor Party!
Our last day on the Big Island. With a fond melancholy, we take in our last overpriced breakfast (eggs are good, but toast is extra. Toast is extra?!?). I have to admit, we’ve left up our “Do Not Disturb” sign the entire time we’ve been here, just so we won’t have to tip the maid for a hastily turned over room. Nate noticed the first night here that the maid’s cart didn’t have glasses on it. He suspects they just rinse out the old glasses and put paper on them again. After that, the sign went up.
I love the Kona “International” Airport. It consists of four or five open air tiki-style huts just a short walk from the runway for the inter-island jumpers. Planes taking off and landing are constantly making a hideous cacophony, droning out speech as well as the band and hula dancers.
Yep, band and hula dancers. Why not, when your airport is a bunch of tiki huts?
We are back in Honolulu for a night while Nate attends the bachelor party for his good friend, Steve, before we fly to Kauai the next morning for the wedding. Nate’s a little nervous: he’s going to be the only Mormon in the group and, well, it’s a bachelor party. Without booze and scantily clad women, it’s kind of a bust, right?
Nate had a little bachelor celebration himself the night before we got married. He ran around all evening trying to take care of last minute wedding details. Steve kindly followed him around, drinking a beer. Wahoo!
I want to go to the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor while Nate heads to Waikiki for the dinner cruise, so we pick up opposite buses on the major Honolulu highway. I ask my driver if this bus is going to the Memorial and he says yes, so I clamber on, but the moment after he’s closed the doors behind me and started the bus up, he turns a dark eye on me and says, “Well, but it’s almost closed now, you know. You’ll never get in.”
So I have to hang out on the bus until the next stop and walk back to the hotel from there. At least in stingy New York fashion I refuse to pay the fare. It’s only two dollars, but it’s the driver’s fault I got on the bus in the first place. So there.
Nate’s evening goes a little something like this:
After over an hour on the bus, Nate ends up in a cab trying to find the dinner cruise place. They go a block and a half. It costs $5. He finally finds the party on the beach and the “dinner cruise” shoves off a few minutes later, only it’s less dinner and less cruise than initially advertised. The “cruise” ship is a catamaran and “dinner” is Jagermeister. Nate has a water. Steve is marrying a German girl and his soon-to-be brothers-in-law, in true German fashion, are enthusiastically availing themselves of the free liquor.
After the “cruise”, the men head to a tiki lounge for the real version of dinner. The Germans, having imbibed enough to resurrect a long-forgotten Viking heritage, are shouting and singing. Nate gets a Hawaiian prime rib steak, served atop an enormous latke, but the food takes almost an hour to arrive. In the meantime, everyone else goes for the only sustenance available in the interim: more alcohol. Steve is a genial host, making the rounds, but gets grumpy near the end when the bill arrives. Apparently, tipping in Germany is not really standard practice and so he has to shout, “You gotta give more money!” a few times at his future relatives in order to cover it.
The next destination is a place where the waitresses keep misplacing their clothing, so Nate decides it’s time to say goodnight. At this point, Steve breaks away from the group. He and Nate have known each other since they were kids and have crossed the country and back together, often surviving only on Wurther’s Originals and Mountain Dew for the entire trip. That’s the sort of life-changing experience that will bring two men together forever. I have to admit that Steve completely blew me away the first time I met him. I had seen pictures of him, a bit goofy and overtall, as an awkward adolescent, only to discover he had exploded into a hulking muscular brute as an adult. At 6’9”, he’s a gigantic, imposing figure, probably even more so a little drunk. He hugs Nate with bone-breaking intensity and says, “Man, when I told you I was getting married you said you’d be there, no matter where it was. And you did it. When I saw you coming up the beach, I said, ‘Man!’.” Then he turns to the group and shouts, “We’re not going to the strip club yet! We’re going to a regular bar so I can have a drink with my friend!” The group is surly. “No! Strip Club!” they say. Steve: “It’s my bachelor party! We’re going to a bar so I can have a drink with my friend, so shut up!”
No reassurances from Nate can stop him, so the stretch limo, crammed with all twenty of them, heads to a nearby bar. The remainder of group stays in the limo still grumbling about the pit-stop before the strip club while Nate and Steve head inside. Steve has a beer. Nate has a ginger ale. Steve repeats his appreciation that Nate has gone to the trouble of being here with enthusiastic hand gestures that threaten to overtake the entire bar. They clink glasses and it’s time for Steve to get back. Nate watches him climb back into the limo, getting a blast of “Yay! Strip club!” before the doors close. He grabs a taxi, sluicing through a misty rain, back to our hotel.
Tora! Tora! Tora!
Our plane is not leaving for Kauai until late in the afternoon, so we make a second attempt to see the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor. Thanks to our crazy Jersey brain clocks, we’re up by 5:30 am, out of the hotel by 7:30 am and at the Memorial just before 8 am, which is good because a huge line of people is already melting out in the early morning sun, tourists in their Hawaiian pastel finest, in a sloppy and slowly moving queue that wraps around the block.
On the phone last night, my father told me that when he and my mother were visiting Pearl Harbor so many years ago, they looked up in the sky and nearly had a heart attack: planes with the Japanese rising sun on them were diving in and around the harbor above. Turns out they were filming Tora! Tora! Tora! that day. I scan the sky briefly, chewing my lip.
A lovely park ranger with a burst of brown-gold curls from under her Smokey the Bear hat tells us that the tickets to see the memorial are free, but are only for a specific time, likely to be about three hours from now. We swelter for about half an hour until reaching the shade of the visitor’s center and get a ticket for about two hours later. I suspect Ms. Smokey outside gives the three hour wait time just so when you get your ticket and it only says two hours, you feel like you’ve caught a break or something, instead of thinking, “Two hours? I wouldn’t wait that long for a table at Le Cirque!”
Perhaps the best thing about the Pearl Harbor site, though, is the fact that on any given day, you can find men who were actually there, who saw the Japanese planes coming in and ran to their ships and units, who charged into the smoking chaos and fought back however they could. Two of these fine gentlemen are seated behind a little table just inside the center and another long line of people are waiting for a chance to get their autographs and have their pictures taken with them, as if Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are at that table. Actually, they do look little bit like Walter Matthau and Tony Randall to me. We reach the front and I ask the Tony, “Can we get your autograph?” to which he roars, “Get ‘em while they’re hot!” and whips one off for me. I pose between them for a picture and as Nate and I are walking off again, I think, What adorable old codgers.
Until—
Well, until you realize that sixty years ago they were facing down the guns of a Japanese fleet and watching as one by the one the great Battleships of the United States were reduced to so much flotsam, hanging useless in the harbor. We watch a short film in the visitor’s center and the footage, grainy and ad hoc as it is, makes your throat lump up, your fists clench. I don’t know how much I can say here because the echoes of September 11th are simply too strong for me. I am touched that day in and out here in the harbor people are coming to see the old ship memorials and are remembering in their minds and hearts the brave men and women who were slaughtered unawares in the early morning, but I am stunned at the depth of national outrage here that is almost entirely absent from the WTC site in New York City.
The towers went down when I was still living in Salt Lake, but less than a year later, we moved to the Big Apple and I can say sincerely that I love few places as much as I love that place, uniquely and fiercely American as anywhere. I have been to the WTC site and it’s just construction now, with a few scattered pictures around the perimeter and some memorial sites put together by the surrounding locals, like the church of St. Francis around the corner. Most of what you notice, though, are the people passing by, on their way to work, or lunch, or shopping, or to whatever destination those hordes of fast walking New Yorkers are headed and the fact that once there were mammoth buildings here, the highest in the world, and less than a day later there were not, this no longer fazes them.
I don’t mock in any way the ultimate sacrifice of those courageous soldiers on “The Day that Will Live in Infamy” as Mr. Roosevelt said, but at least they were soldiers, trained for battle and had volunteered to potentially lay down their lives for their country some day, but the attack on New York…they were just people, people like their fast-walking counterparts today and why are we not completely outraged that fanatics aimed several 150 ton missiles at them? Why are we still tossing flowers in the Pacific waters above the sunken Arizona and yet go strolling past our graveyard on the Atlantic full of innocent men and women and children?
I don’t know. I have to hope that it’s about the natural American inclination toward forgiveness. Despite the heart-wrenching feeling in the air around the memorial as we read the Shrine’s names of seamen and marines above the Arizona’s slow-leaking remains, there is no animosity toward Japan here. I have to think that we just don’t know how to stay angry at someone who has wronged us. We want to fix the relationship and move onto friendship. That there are places in the world that hate us and no amount of reasonable reconciliation offered on our part can change that seems impossible.
So we move on anyway. We fast walk around our empty building site and show how little it hurts us. You can rail at us and despise us and try to maim us, but we forgive you and move on. That is who we are.
-Mara
Chasing the Afternoon
3/16
We boarded the plane about 1:30 pm. Despite the cool drizzle of rain we’d had on the way to the airport, it was sunny now, brilliantly so as we squashed into our ridiculously small coach seats. When we take off the sun is a beacon of immense potency ahead of us, reflecting off voluminous and voluptuous rolling cloud hills.
It will stay that way for 11 hours.
I thought about the stories where a man chases the rainbow for its pot of gold and how he must pursue it without looking directly at it because if he looks, the rainbow will appear to be as far away from him as when he started. So it was with our afternoon. We could never catch it. Across five thousand miles, six time zones, land and ocean, we chased it. The clouds were the land we tracked it over, sometimes generally flat but gently rippled, like fields of the Midwest, other times bulky and spiked with sudden drop-offs into open valleys like the Wasatch Mountain range where I grew up. We flew fast and free over our terrain, but the sun kept ahead of us and like Icarus we groped and groped toward it and eventually fell—touching down in Hawaii in defeat.
And we were really were defeated then. As we descended the sun was growing pink and distant, the cloud volcanoes—grand cones of them erupting out of otherwise flat cloud fields—above Honolulu serving to hide it. We touched down, deplaned and headed for the baggage claim. Behind us the afternoon ended and, in barely a few minutes, it was dark.
Capitalism, the Scourge and Savior of Hawaii, Part One
3/17
This morning, we left the hotel and headed hand in hand down toward the beach which the hotel’s website had promised was a mere twenty-five yards away. I had seen the ocean from the balcony of our hotel room, its placid blue speckled with tiny whitecaps, and thought that maybe we could grab a spot on the beach, break out the books, and spend a relaxing morning acknowledging our feebleness to its immenseness. Why is it that recognizing how much more great and powerful nature is compared to us results in a feeling of pure contentment? Something to explore later, maybe, when we hit Volcano National Park.
Only the beach proved just about as elusive as the sun had yesterday and the resort area with all its tiny shops in bright colors that had looked so cute from our balcony turned out to be teaming with parasites. Five minutes into our walk, we were accosted by an otherwise harmless looking woman in a sundress and enormous eighties hair who wanted to know all about us, where we were from, how long we were here, what kind of things did we want to see and did we know she could get us discounts to things, why didn’t we step inside, etc. Our spider scam sense that New York hammered into us should have immediately kicked in, but hey, this was Hawaii, we were happy to be wandering down to the beach, she looked so nice, blah blah blah. We told her we had come here by taxi, but were looking to rent a car for the remainder of the week and did she know if there was a rental place nearby or did we have to go back to the airport? “You have to go back to the airport,” she said, “but I live right by there. I’d be happy to take you. When do you want to go?”
Scam alert! Scam alert! We told her we were on our way to get some breakfast, but we’d be back up this way later. She said, “There are a lot of people like me down the beach who’ll try to talk to you. Just tell them that Diane is helping you, okay?” I was already hard tugging Nate out of there—I’m a total misanthrope, I admit it. I hadn’t come to Hawaii to chat up strangers. I think she guessed I was the less friendly of the two of us because she weakly tried to win me over by shouting after us, “You have such pretty hair!”
In only one sense did she end up telling us the whole truth—she was absolutely right than this little stretch of otherwise adorable open-air shops and restaurants was overrun by “people like her”. We spotted a sign for a deal on luau tickets and the instant I pointed it out to Nate another Diane-type popped up. “Now the luau tickets are normally 72 per person, but I can get that down to 28 for both of you together,” she said. “And there is snorkeling over at the Kona Resort bay—you can see Green Sea Turtles there—and we can get you set up with all the equipment. And are you going to the volcano? We’ve got a great deal on the airplane tours, that’s the only good way to see it, you know…”
So what did Diane and her many prototypes want with us for these amazing deals? Just a few minutes of our time, really, a small price to pay, just come to our presentation about a timeshare option, no high pressure sales tactics we promise, and then you can have the rest of the week to do these fun things which we will give you for practically nothing! You have such pretty hair!
I think it is possible to get a good deal out of a timeshare buy. Nate’s parents did it for years, but it requires you to deal with a constant barrage of pressure to buy more more more. Like I said, I’m a misanthrope. When I go on vacation, I go to be alone (or in this case, to be with just Nate who, with work and school, is normally gone all but eight days out of the month).
But then again, all of these other things they were hawking really were more expensive on their own. Wouldn’t it be reasonable to go to a little sales tour, reject the pitch, and then get all these great discounts?
I’m a big fan of Capitalism—I think other more communal economic ideals sound great on paper, but in practice become coercive and stagnant. Free markets are the best and only way people can build their own wealth and that freedom has turned America into the wealthiest nation on earth, but it made me more than a little grumpy to spend the first few hours of our vacation trying to navigate the maze of “marketing representatives” who, like the jumping spiders Thomas loves, had staked themselves in the obvious path of their prey and then waited to spring.
But what about the luau, an event I had wanted to do before the sticker shock of a timeshare-presentation-free price hit me? Do we try to trick the timeshare troopers on their own turf to wrangle a good deal or we do we shell out the big bucks? Which is more valuable, I asked Nate, our time or our money? Which option makes us feel the least like suckers?
Capitalism, the Scourge and Savior of Hawaii, Part Two
I don’t know what it’s like to be native Hawaiian. I suspect for those living here now, it’s like being anyone else with an interesting historical background that has little effect on your current way of life, but then again, maybe not. Unlike most other “interesting historical backgrounds”, Old Hawaii is still here, encased in a time capsule, and it only costs 72 bucks per slack-jawed tourist to catch a glimpse of it.
Supposedly, anyway. As much as I want to see fire and hula dancing and a full roasted pig, the idea of a luau turned poisonous to me the longer I listened to these timeshare parasites hawk their discounts to it. I know there are real luaus in Hawaii, but they are private affairs, and a Hawaiian-shirt-wearing tourist can’t purchase his/her way into them—wedding luaus, birthday party luaus (bar mitzvah luaus?!?!?).
Capitalism has saved Old Hawaii in a way. I asked Nate last night if the Hawaiian language is a bit like the various Gaelic dialects in the British Isles, living on for nostalgia’s sake and because there are people like us who have fetishized it and crave a piece of it and are willing to pay for it.
How do you preserve a cultural heritage without selling it? And how do you separate nostalgia from history? Would Old Hawaii still feel as vibrant here if there weren’t tourists to feed it? Is that a good or bad thing? And how much of it is real?
At a wedding reception a few years back, I ran into a fellow from Ireland and got a chance to gush about how I just loved Ireland and how wonderful it was even though I had never had a chance to be there and he replied sullenly, “You don’t love Ireland. You love what you think Ireland is. All you Americans think Ireland is this lovely green magical place, but it’s not. The cities are dirty and stinky and the country is poor.” That was pretty much the end of the conversation.
I don’t think that Hawaii much fits the description of the angry Irishman, but how much of that is from wrapping some romanticized version of its past into a package palatable and priced well for tourist consumption?
Nate and I never did do the luau. The timeshare discount vs. full-price admission turned out to be a zerosum game for us. Either the timeshare people win or the luau marketers do. Instead, we drove about twenty miles north to a pristine and wildly expensive shopping center at Mauna Lani because at 7 pm every night, there is a free hula performance by Traditions Hawaii. In the midst of this tightly stylized pedmall disguised as a Hawaiian village, we watched a dance recreation of King Kamehameha’s secret birth and rise to power among the Hawaiian tribes. It was simple, the dancing was fantastic, and it was only briefly interrupted by a bizarre English pop song performance by the lead that some moron probably thought was necessary to keep the unwashed American masses interested. Was it authentic? Who can say? It was authentic to what Hawaii is now, tourist and tradition intertwined, the two symbiotes feeding and sustaining each other. Afterwards, the viewing audience toured the shops in the compound, which is probably the main reason the performance was free. Nate and I bought some crackers, cheese, and dried mango from the over-priced grocery store and headed home.
Mara vs. the Volcano
3/18
It’s raining tremendously here, but without wind, so I can sit on the hotel balcony, listen to it pounding down, smell the salty residue of an ocean rain. We will be in Hilo today where it has rained every day of the week. The storms blow in from the east and cannot climb Mauna Loa, the Big Island’s grim volcanic summit glowering more than 13000 feet over the rest of the us, so most of the time it drops all its rain on the eastern side, which incidentally is where Kilauea, Hawaii’s last constantly exploding monster has been spewing since 1983. Fire and water, natural enemies, imprisoned on the same piece of the island together.
The volcano is our ultimate destination today, but we started on the Kona side of Big Island, the touristy beach capital where we chose our hotel, partially to escape Hilo’s rain. But that means that in order to see the volcano and to come back home again, we will have to round the entire island in a day—almost a 300 mile round trip—on the Big Island’s single circuit highway which winds sinuously around the perimeter, climbing from sea level beachfronts to 3000 foot elevations and then back down again, all the while twisting like a canyon road and sometimes dropping down to 35 mile an hour speed limits. A scenic way, but not one for getting places in a hurry.
We stop for breakfast at a tiny roadside café that looks like a rickety shack on the outside, but is surprisingly lovely on the inside. It is perched above a cliffside that plunges at least a hundred feet below us over the side, but what a fragrant ride down it would be. The rise is overrun with flowers, long cones of them in red and white, and there is even an avocado tree hanging heady and fully ripe only a few yards away. I love that in Hawaii, all the restaurants are open air. There is no reason to have walls—it just never gets cold enough. It felt a little deviant to me the first day here, that everything is just open and anything can wander in. I’m used to barriers and it challenges my natural inclination toward safety.
Speaking of anything wandering in, a tiny green gecko is climbing the wooden beam near our table. My heart thumps. How much I miss Thomas! He would have loved to see this adorable little lizard sunning himself barely a foot or two away. I have to sneak close and take his picture. I take a video, too, so that when we get home Thomas can see how it looks and moves. I wish I could take something like this home for him. He’s a touchy kid—a flat screen of moving pictures is totally inadequate. He likes texture and weight. Asking him not to touch is like asking him not to breathe.
The food is also surprisingly elegant—silky papaya stuffed with apples and pineapple in a cream sauce and toasted coconut and Nate’s eggs benedict which are served on little crisp biscuits and artistically dripped with hollandaise. Everything we’ve paid for so far in Hawaii has been ridiculously priced and the prices here are as high as elsewhere, but for once, the food actually approaches “worth it”. The single waitress is an older white woman in ragged jeans and a halter top, with long blond hair just loose. She looks like a hippy who just wandered in once and never left. She is pleasant and has a calm glow about her, like the rest of this place.
Back on the road, we don’t have a real schedule, except to reach the volcano by early afternoon, so we decide to stop wherever sounds interesting. We pull off next at Pu’uhonua o Honaunau, the last “Place of Refuge” in Hawaii that the National Park Service has managed to preserve. Apparently in the old Hawaiian religion, kapu was code of conduct—mostly acts that were taboo—so severe that managing to even accidentally break one of its laws meant death. And considering the laws—women can’t eat with men, you can’t walk too close to a chief or even cast your shadow on him, etc.—the chance of breaking one accidentally seemed pretty high. Fearing the gods would punish them if they harbored a law-breaker, the people would chase you until they either caught and killed you, or you reached a place of refuge where the bones of old chiefs are buried and blood cannot be spilt. The priest would absolve of your crime and you could go home again—at least until the next time your shadow fell in an inconvenient direction, sinner!
“Let’s build a wall to protect ourselves from our own ludicrous system of justice!” I snarked to Nate while we toured the grounds. They say that Louis XVI of France had a extreme code of politeness at his palace gatherings—you had to scratch at the door to be let in, you couldn’t knock, etc.—in order to keep his nobles so occupied with etiquette that they couldn’t plot against him. Unfortunately for Louis, it was the peasants who ended up plotting against him, and peasants don’t get invited to those kind of parties.
Unsurprisingly, most of the kapu rules focused on women and what we could and couldn’t do. What is it about us, men? We don’t spend our time coming up with rules that are for you and you only. I mean, yes, you have to pick up your socks and use a coaster, but so does everyone else.
Weirdly, though, one of the laws was that a woman couldn’t cook a meal for a man. Who came up with this rule? Maybe you could also forbid us to do your laundry? I have a few more things on my list that I could be forbidden from. My guess is that for this reason alone the whole kapu business eventually went out of favor. How many years of cooking their own dinners before the Hawaiian men chased the original rule-maker himself all the way to Pu’uhonua o Honaunau? “And stay there,” they sniffed, walking back home to a warm meal.
There was also this guy at the National Park Service site. Nate tried to ask him a question and he barely looked up response. We’re not quite sure if he was actually supposed to be there as a part of the exhibit. Maybe the lightweight NPS rangers were too afraid to ask him to leave. I would be.
Sea turtles are swimming in the shallows here. We get as close as we dare and rapidly snap pictures.
Back on the road. We stop at a cliffside where the wind is rushing violently across the beach and up the hill. It is covered in lush vegetation and the waves below are smashing majestically against the land. Someone is flying foam airplanes on the hillside—we can see the planes but not the people. They look like a flock of some strange local bird.
“Black sand beaches!” I yell at Nate about two seconds before we miss the turnoff to Punalu’u. We have already passed the southernmost tip of Big Island and are working our way up the opposite side now toward Volcano National Park. Nate yells, “Where?!” even as he is slamming the breaks and careening the car around. We bounce onto the exit, our little rental car kicking up in the back like a donkey (Hi Alamo Rental Car Service!), but manage to not to go skidding off the road. We wind down to the beachfront which, unlike almost everything else here in Hawaii, has no entrance fee. People are just parking and getting out. The only real sign says it’s illegal to remove any of the sand from the beach. I don’t really know why until I get a chance to stand on it.
Obsidian. The most beautiful of volcanic rock. What looks like a long swath of mud leading down the water is, in fact, miniscule shards of obsidian, so miniscule that they look like glistening grains of black salt in your hand. The sand is soft under the feet, like any sand, only it’s dark and shiny. I sift it through my fingers in wonder. Nate tries to scratch our initials where the surf has soaked it but he can’t finish fast enough for me to take a picture before the foamy sea obliterates it. He manages to build a little mini-Volcano, though, and we cap it with a fallen yellow flower. Then in comes the water again and sluices the whole thing away.
Finally, Volcano National Park. We’ve come up the Hilo (eastern) side of the island now and into its rain. A fine warm mist is coating the car (and us) as we make our way to the visitor’s center.
All I want—all I have wanted for this whole trip—is to see lava flowing. We rejected the overpriced air tours because we want to see it for ourselves, if we can, hiking as close to the molten earth as we can get and with no panes of glass between it and us (okay and prop plane rides like that make me soooooo motion sick, even when I’m well-drugged. Last thing I want to be doing over the Volcano is erupting myself. Everyone together now, “Ewwwww…”).
Inside we stumble into the park ranger telling a group of hikers that up until a month ago, the only way to see the lava was the take one of those plane rides, but the lava has changed direction and is now actually running into the sea just east of here. The only way to get there is to drive up highway 11 for twenty miles, turn onto highway 130 for another twenty miles and go on past the roadblock at the end of it, follow the remaining gravel road to a small parking area, then break out the flashlights and cross the old lava flows to the sea where, in the near distance, molten rock and water are violently clashing, throwing steam and stone sometimes thirty feet in the air.
It’s easiest to see the lava after dark, so we have time to drive up to Hilo for the last event on our semi-itinerary: eat the very last cheap food left in Hawaii, the Loco Moco. Café 100 is one of Hilo’s oldest fast food joints, having been around since the 50’s. It’s named for Hawaiian’s 100th Battalion from WWII, a battalion full of Japanese soldiers. The Loco Moco is its own invention: a hamburger patty topped with an local island egg over white rice and smothered in brown gravy. Does this sound like Nate food or what? It costs a measly $1.99. We have seen Loco Moco imitations around here in Kona, but their price hovers somewhere between $5 and $9. Not only do we want to try the real thing, but we’re also tired of feeling like suckers every time we break open our wallets.
We know we’ve reached the island’s biggest town because of the Wal-Mart. And three MacDonald’s, all within a two mile radius of each other. Aside from the main strip, though, Hilo is almost all squat little island houses: single-story with steeply tilted, corrugated roofs. We drive through them to Café 100 which looks like it’s still in the original 50’s building (it isn’t: tsunamis destroyed two earlier Café 100’s before this one was built). The café is rough-hewn and looks like any roadside pit stop serving fast food. They have about ten different Locos on the menu, including a salmon tempura loco that I order. Nate gets the real thing. We eat them at one of the many picnic-style benches around the perimeter. My egg is overcooked, but Nate’s is just right: he draws a line through the center of it and thick, wet yolk oozes out to cover everything. I’ve seldom seen him happier.
It’s a little after 4:30 pm by the time we’re grinding the rental car over the gravel road (Hi again Alamo Rental Car Service!) to the lava site. The road is so tight that any car trying to come the other way has to negotiate a careful waltz with us—one tire this way, one tire that, spin your partner around and then go! We find a place in the parking lot where rangers are handing out flyers with safety tips on them. I’m still blown away that they even try to let people do this, what with the tort-happy union we live in. Out on the newest lava flows, the benches are completely unstable. Recently 43 acres disappeared into the ocean overnight. One wrong step and you’ll go plunging into the abyss with it. Not to mention the sulfur dioxide in the air which is toxic even to the average healthy person, let alone anyone who already has breathing problems. The rangers have set up markers to show the best way along the lava flow, but there’s nothing to force you to stay with them. Good luck intrepid tourist! Hope you come back alive!
In the distance, smoke and steam are spurting up in great clouds. The air is practically sizzling—I can see the heat waves warping the black hills behind us. We pick our way delicately over the ripples of cooled magma. This whole area feels delicate, like a frozen pond, that any moment this thin surface could crack and we’d take a sudden and very hot bath.
We reach the end of the bench. Although there is lava flow still beyond us, about an eighth of a mile’s worth that reaches the sea, that part is new lava flow and not likely able to carry the weight of a few hundred tourists tromping back and forth across it day in and day out. We crawl up on a near rock outcropping to better see the clouds of steam that are shooting up from the water about five hundred yards away from us. No lava is immediately visible, but the afternoon is still bright and if there are flows they are too thin to make a dent in the sunlight. Until—there! In the distance the black shore cracks and the earth’s red blood spurts out. Everyone oohs and ahhs and a cacophony of camera clicks follow. We try to take a picture of it, but our little camera barely has a zoom factor of 3. We get a great picture of the steam clouds and what looks like an artifact of red on an otherwise dark field.
For a long time, that is all there is.
Nate and I find a roll of pumice to still on and wait for sunset. A few feet away from us a little boy is tossing lumps of it, watching parts of them disintegrate into dust when they hit. His father comes by to tell him to stop. He stops for a moment until the father wanders away again and then he picks up another and throws it. He’s turned toward us now, completely unconscious of the people around him. The next rock he lobs lands at my feet. His father is back, grabbing his arm and telling him in a harsh whisper that if he doesn’t cut it out, they are going right out of here and there’ll be no lava for him, now quit it! His mother glances sharply over here, too. “Stop that or the park ranger will arrest you and throw you in jail,” she says offhandedly to her son. Nate and I have to snicker behind our hands. Whenever Thomas is doing something even semi-dangerous, I find myself saying whatever possible to get him to stop. “That’s a good way to lose your head!” I’ll say, to which Nate will add, “Yeah and then you’ll have to get a monkey head.” I don’t think I’ve ever threatened him with arrest and possible jail time, though.
The sun is going down so we crawl back up onto the edge of bench as lots of people are arriving by now and we want a good viewing spot. Here and there little bits of red are starting to appear across the otherwise empty field. Unlike our flight to Honolulu, the sun seems to be taking an abysmally slow time to set. But the steam clouds are turning crimson. Now and then the wind will shift a bit and blow them away from the land and there…the shoreline is awash in lava. Wounded, it drips its blood into the sea and the sea explodes. An awe and terror quite unlike anything I’ve ever felt is making my heart beat fast. My chest feels light and hollow, my lungs not quite able to fill up.
All around us, Hawaiians have tossed offerings to Pele, their volcano god that lives in Kilauea: leis and leaf-wrapped bundles. A collective shout goes up from the bench as one daring grandmother is being escorted by a Civil Defense policeman out on the new flow—the one the rangers ordered us never to step foot on—toward the lava. I hear someone saying the Lord’s Prayer behind me. They stop roughly a hundred yards from the lava. Grandmother raises her arms in the air, appears to be chanting. The bench here is quiet, people whispering back and forth. She tosses the lei she has brought and they start back toward us. When they reach the bench, there is a collective sigh of relief.
At last the sun is gone and although everyone around us is raucous with excitement, talking and taking pictures, Nate and I are quiet. He has taken the advice of a photographer near us and is resting the camera on a flattened part of our backpack, pressing the timer then letting it go. But no camera can really capture what it looks like from this high slope above the lava fields. In the dark, the lava is livid. You can actually see the different shades of it as it oozes through the stone of its own make, a shifting pattern of red and yellow and orange, liquid fire on the hunt. For over thirty years it has groped its way toward the sea from Kilauea’s angry mouth. The water hisses and spits at it, then erupts into great mushroom clouds of steam. You feel like if the ocean weren’t so very vast, the lava would have gobbled it up already. Thomas, fascinated by fire like any little kid, wanted to know if there were any fires that water can’t put out. I said yes, of course, and talked to him about grease fires and big forest fires, but this is the real fire. I wish desperately that he could see it. The water seems to be no match here—and yet, like the Union side of the Civil War, survives to triumph on sheer numbers. Down, down the lava drips and the greatness of the ocean devours it at last. The glow dies out and black stone is all that is left. Fire and water. Both win, both lose.
We have a great spot here on the bench—our view is obscured by nothing—and so eventually we decide we ought to give it up to someone else. My leg has fallen asleep. Nate helps me down and we have to break out the flashlights from our pack to pick our way back across the lava flow in the dark. Behind us, the sky is alight, enormous crimson clouds rolling away. The sound of the sea shushing back and forth against the shore is constantly broken up by the erupting hiss of steam. We are lucky to be able to turn our backs on that ancient battle and go home. I doubt we’ll ever see its like again.
Catching up
3/19
After our Big Island adventure yesterday, today is a lazy day. We sleep in (until 6:30 am! This is an improvement over yesterday where we woke up at 5 am. We just can’t shake this Jersey time. Helps us get on the road, though) and grab breakfast a beachfront buffet, but I feel grumpy all over again. The buffet is $8 a person and consists of some hard breakfast burritos, sloppy eggs, freezer-style hashbrowns, and dried-out biscuits. Drinks are extra and limited to a single refill. I’m beginning to feel like my mother-in-law who went grocery shopping with me last Thursday. She had just come from Mexico and made sounds of distress every time she confronted a price tag. My instinct is that ordinarily things in Hawaii cannot possibly cost this much, but that, like anywhere, the tourists are too easy a target. They are also serving a Loco Moco here. It costs $10.
We give in the price-gouging spirit, though, and go shopping along the Kailua-Kona shore. I get a little artificial flower hairclip for a not-too-terrible amount, despite the fact the clip-part is just hot-glued onto the silk flower. Nate wanders into a natural wood open air market and calls me over. We tour the carvings and bump into the owner, a fit tan guy in his forties who is wearing only a pair of board shorts and shell necklace. An old surfer dude who set up shop on his favorite shore. Everything is hand-carved here and there are painted pieces of extraordinary workmanship and even more extraordinary price tags. We find an unpainted piece—an intertwined male and female figure—that looks like it would fit in among other things at home. There are two styles: Nate wants to get the more “voluptuous” one, but I veto it. She looks a little cold to me.
We take a long afternoon nap—the humidity and the heat make sleep deep and delicious. When we wake up, it’s late in the afternoon and we have only one destination left: Sushi En Fuego a Japanese-Spanish fusion restaurant right on the beach. We’re hoping to see the sunset—every night we’ve been here so far, we’ve been off doing something and didn’t have a chance to see the sun go down over the ocean. No luck this time, either, though. The sky is clouded over. There is barely a pink sheen to it as darkness descends.
We eat sushi and tapas and listen to the water lapping right under the balcony. The table umbrellas come down and the tiki torches flare up. Nate sighs. “Every man, everywhere, wants his own tiki lounge,” he says. This strikes me as absolute truth if there is any.
Bachelor Party!
Subtitled: Nate “Comports Himself with Dignity”
Subtitled: I.E. Skips the Strip Club
3/20
Our last day on the Big Island. With a fond melancholy, we take in our last overpriced breakfast (eggs are good, but toast is extra. Toast is extra?!?). I have to admit, we’ve left up our “Do Not Disturb” sign the entire time we’ve been here, just so we won’t have to tip the maid for a hastily turned over room. Nate noticed the first night here that the maid’s cart didn’t have glasses on it. He suspects they just rinse out the old glasses and put paper on them again. After that, the sign went up.
I love the Kona “International” Airport. It consists of four or five open air tiki-style huts just a short walk from the runway for the inter-island jumpers. Planes taking off and landing are constantly making a hideous cacophony, droning out speech as well as the band and hula dancers.
Yep, band and hula dancers. Why not, when your airport is a bunch of tiki huts?
We are back in Honolulu for a night while Nate attends the bachelor party for his good friend, Steve, before we fly to Kauai the next morning for the wedding. Nate’s a little nervous: he’s going to be the only Mormon in the group and, well, it’s a bachelor party. Without booze and scantily clad women, it’s kind of a bust, right?
Nate had a little bachelor celebration himself the night before we got married. He ran around all evening trying to take care of last minute wedding details. Steve kindly followed him around, drinking a beer. Wahoo!
I want to go to the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor while Nate heads to Waikiki for the dinner cruise, so we pick up opposite buses on the major Honolulu highway. I ask my driver if this bus is going to the Memorial and he says yes, so I clamber on, but the moment after he’s closed the doors behind me and started the bus up, he turns a dark eye on me and says, “Well, but it’s almost closed now, you know. You’ll never get in.”
So I have to hang out on the bus until the next stop and walk back to the hotel from there. At least in stingy New York fashion I refuse to pay the fare. It’s only two dollars, but it’s the driver’s fault I got on the bus in the first place. So there.
Nate’s evening goes a little something like this:
After over an hour on the bus, Nate ends up in a cab trying to find the dinner cruise place. They go a block and a half. It costs $5. He finally finds the party on the beach and the “dinner cruise” shoves off a few minutes later, only it’s less dinner and less cruise than initially advertised. The “cruise” ship is a catamaran and “dinner” is Jagermeister. Nate has a water. Steve is marrying a German girl and his soon-to-be brothers-in-law, in true German fashion, are enthusiastically availing themselves of the free liquor.
After the “cruise”, the men head to a tiki lounge for the real version of dinner. The Germans, having imbibed enough to resurrect a long-forgotten Viking heritage, are shouting and singing. Nate gets a Hawaiian prime rib steak, served atop an enormous latke, but the food takes almost an hour to arrive. In the meantime, everyone else goes for the only sustenance available in the interim: more alcohol. Steve is a genial host, making the rounds, but gets grumpy near the end when the bill arrives. Apparently, tipping in Germany is not really standard practice and so he has to shout, “You gotta give more money!” a few times at his future relatives in order to cover it.
The next destination is a place where the waitresses keep misplacing their clothing, so Nate decides it’s time to say goodnight. At this point, Steve breaks away from the group. He and Nate have known each other since they were kids and have crossed the country and back together, often surviving only on Wurther’s Originals and Mountain Dew for the entire trip. That’s the sort of life-changing experience that will bring two men together forever. I have to admit that Steve completely blew me away the first time I met him. I had seen pictures of him, a bit goofy and overtall, as an awkward adolescent, only to discover he had exploded into a hulking muscular brute as an adult. At 6’9”, he’s a gigantic, imposing figure, probably even more so a little drunk. He hugs Nate with bone-breaking intensity and says, “Man, when I told you I was getting married you said you’d be there, no matter where it was. And you did it. When I saw you coming up the beach, I said, ‘Man!’.” Then he turns to the group and shouts, “We’re not going to the strip club yet! We’re going to a regular bar so I can have a drink with my friend!” The group is surly. “No! Strip Club!” they say. Steve: “It’s my bachelor party! We’re going to a bar so I can have a drink with my friend, so shut up!”
No reassurances from Nate can stop him, so the stretch limo, crammed with all twenty of them, heads to a nearby bar. The remainder of group stays in the limo still grumbling about the pit-stop before the strip club while Nate and Steve head inside. Steve has a beer. Nate has a ginger ale. Steve repeats his appreciation that Nate has gone to the trouble of being here with enthusiastic hand gestures that threaten to overtake the entire bar. They clink glasses and it’s time for Steve to get back. Nate watches him climb back into the limo, getting a blast of “Yay! Strip club!” before the doors close. He grabs a taxi, sluicing through a misty rain, back to our hotel.
Tora! Tora! Tora!
3/21
Our plane is not leaving for Kauai until late in the afternoon, so we make a second attempt to see the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor. Thanks to our crazy Jersey brain clocks, we’re up by 5:30 am, out of the hotel by 7:30 am and at the Memorial just before 8 am, which is good because a huge line of people is already melting out in the early morning sun, tourists in their Hawaiian pastel finest, in a sloppy and slowly moving queue that wraps around the block.
On the phone last night, my father told me that when he and my mother were visiting Pearl Harbor so many years ago, they looked up in the sky and nearly had a heart attack: planes with the Japanese rising sun on them were diving in and around the harbor above. Turns out they were filming Tora! Tora! Tora! that day. I scan the sky briefly, chewing my lip.
A lovely park ranger with a burst of brown-gold curls from under her Smokey the Bear hat tells us that the tickets to see the memorial are free, but are only for a specific time, likely to be about three hours from now. We swelter for about half an hour until reaching the shade of the visitor’s center and get a ticket for about two hours later. I suspect Ms. Smokey outside gives the three hour wait time just so when you get your ticket and it only says two hours, you feel like you’ve caught a break or something, instead of thinking, “Two hours? I wouldn’t wait that long for a table at Le Cirque!”
Perhaps the best thing about the Pearl Harbor site, though, is the fact that on any given day, you can find men who were actually there, who saw the Japanese planes coming in and ran to their ships and units, who charged into the smoking chaos and fought back however they could. Two of these fine gentlemen are seated behind a little table just inside the center and another long line of people are waiting for a chance to get their autographs and have their pictures taken with them, as if Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are at that table. Actually, they do look little bit like Walter Matthau and Tony Randall to me. We reach the front and I ask the Tony, “Can we get your autograph?” to which he roars, “Get ‘em while they’re hot!” and whips one off for me. I pose between them for a picture and as Nate and I are walking off again, I think, What adorable old codgers.
Until—
Well, until you realize that sixty years ago they were facing down the guns of a Japanese fleet and watching as one by the one the great Battleships of the United States were reduced to so much flotsam, hanging useless in the harbor. We watch a short film in the visitor’s center and the footage, grainy and ad hoc as it is, makes your throat lump up, your fists clench. I don’t know how much I can say here because the echoes of September 11th are simply too strong for me. I am touched that day in and out here in the harbor people are coming to see the old ship memorials and are remembering in their minds and hearts the brave men and women who were slaughtered unawares in the early morning, but I am stunned at the depth of national outrage here that is almost entirely absent from the WTC site in New York City.
The towers went down when I was still living in Salt Lake, but less than a year later, we moved to the Big Apple and I can say sincerely that I love few places as much as I love that place, uniquely and fiercely American as anywhere. I have been to the WTC site and it’s just construction now, with a few scattered pictures around the perimeter and some memorial sites put together by the surrounding locals, like the church of St. Francis around the corner. Most of what you notice, though, are the people passing by, on their way to work, or lunch, or shopping, or to whatever destination those hordes of fast walking New Yorkers are headed and the fact that once there were mammoth buildings here, the highest in the world, and less than a day later there were not, this no longer fazes them.
I don’t mock in any way the ultimate sacrifice of those courageous soldiers on “The Day that Will Live in Infamy” as Mr. Roosevelt said, but at least they were soldiers, trained for battle and had volunteered to potentially lay down their lives for their country some day, but the attack on New York…they were just people, people like their fast-walking counterparts today and why are we not completely outraged that fanatics aimed several 150 ton missiles at them? Why are we still tossing flowers in the Pacific waters above the sunken Arizona and yet go strolling past our graveyard on the Atlantic full of innocent men and women and children?
I don’t know. I have to hope that it’s about the natural American inclination toward forgiveness. Despite the heart-wrenching feeling in the air around the memorial as we read the Shrine’s names of seamen and marines above the Arizona’s slow-leaking remains, there is no animosity toward Japan here. I have to think that we just don’t know how to stay angry at someone who has wronged us. We want to fix the relationship and move onto friendship. That there are places in the world that hate us and no amount of reasonable reconciliation offered on our part can change that seems impossible.
So we move on anyway. We fast walk around our empty building site and show how little it hurts us. You can rail at us and despise us and try to maim us, but we forgive you and move on. That is who we are.
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