We Saw Miracles

I’ve come to feel almost familiar with Oahu. I know the map. Honolulu is stuck in the nexus of several high valleys that don’t connect at the top, and this city shaped like an octopus has octopus roads and highways, but the expressway will let you out easily enough except during the long rush hours. But my feelings of familiarity are illusions. Maybe I finally know Hawaii just well enough to realize how little I know. I agree with Violet Paget; you can only know a landscape by walking it. Paget distinguished between the automobile (of her day, possibly steam-powered), the carriage, the railway train, horseback, and on foot. We can now add the airplane and the satellite, and all these ways of knowing provide their own independent information, but in the end we are animals. To know a place on the level of the animal, the animal has to walk it.

Oahu beach.

I have not walked enough of Hawaii to know it. On foot, Hawaii is the size of kingdoms—fairy-tale-sized kingdoms with what to a landlubber falsely appear to be obvious borders, the channels between the islands. Of course the channels connect the islands, and the sea is the largest part of Hawaii. Hawaii’s borders are far beyond the horizon. So mainlanders don't get Hawaii--we see it backward.

Thus we have the idiom “mysterious island” in our westernized/westernizing world culture, from the Odyssey to Jules Verne and old 50s movies, ready to furnish man-eating plants and have a secret. It doesn’t matter what the secret is; we merely have to not know it—to keep the secret, even from ourselves. Such is the outsider’s knowledge.

Secret Oahu.

It's a place of friends, relatives, and good memories.

Are friends electric? My fellow editor and poet extraordinary, Pat Matsueda, and self in the Honolulu night.

This fall was my first trip to Maui. Maui is far larger than it seems by car, due to the road configuration.  Maui’s larger than Oahu but the driver on Maui inevitably crosses and recrosses the old sugar cane flats between the two volcanoes and this sense of X stands in the way of appreciating the island's real size.

Sometimes I think maybe nothing is entirely wrong, even our fairy-tales. The islands of Hawaii were once warring kingdoms, and on Maui as on the Big Island the ruins of fortifications can still be seen. Hawaii’s warring states era was conducive to ruin, we can be sure, and mercifully the wars were ended by Kamehameha with the unification of the islands into a single polity.

Kamehameha's cannon at Lahaina.

From Kapalua on Maui, the island of Molokai looms to the north.

Plumeria.

A thousand uses, such as playing with your food.

For Kamehamea, and for the Pacific whalers and traders and eventually for the U.S. Navy, the Lahaina Roadstead on Maui was a strategic locus, the navigational key to the whole Hawaiian chain. The Kingdom of Hawaii, founded on peace and aloha, had no defense against the barbarians from the sea, heavily armed, bringing rum, disease, missionary disenablers, and the attempted destruction of a complete civilization.

The Lahaina Roadstead.

Relics of the whaling fleet at the jail in Lahaina.

On the Lahaina waterfront today.

Maui is a place of enormous historic significance and depth of identity. The reticulation of identity, kanaka maoli, haole, local, tourist, customer, owner, homeless guy in culvert (can also be any of the above), persists on the sidewalk in Maui’s interesting and relaxed hippie towns. Somehow the god of the volcano seems to have an eye on everything, Maui himself. They say the huge stone bones of Haleakala are dead. Tourists off the cruiser might not even have the time ashore to realize how careful Maui is, everybody walking around calm but strangely alert to the god over their shoulder.

Wailuku.

On the road to the volcano, proteas were for sale from protea farms on the roadside. Proteas are a rare survival from the Cretaceous Period,  a vastly ancient flowering plant native to South Africa and to certain other land masses that were originally part of Gondwanaland. Hawaii seems a perfect habitat for protea, but they require a master gardener.

My daughter-in-law Kahiki and Proteas.

Hard to believe these are real but they are.

The long winding road to the summit of Haleakala passes by a curious arts & crafts era legacy, Hosmer Grove. The Hosmer Grove forest preserve was started by Hawaii's first territorial forester. Quoting Wikipedia, “Ralph Hosmer imported tree species from around the world in hopes of creating a viable timber industry. In 1927 he began planting stands of pine, spruce, cedar and eucalyptus at this site, which can still be seen today in the grove. Only 20 of the 86 species introduced survived.”

Hosmer's Grove eucalyptus.

Where the honeycreepers lurk.

Eucalyptus and pines are doing well, but not the white pine and the eastern red cedar, two trees native to my yard in Virginia, which never had a prayer on Maui. This densely tangled temperate forest is well known to bird watchers as a top spot to see honeycreepers. We saw five male i’iwi and they are the miracle mentioned in the title of this blog. No prayer of getting a photo of a bird in my case, since they fly like rockets, but the antique lithograph turns out to be pretty accurate.

The scarlet i'iwi.

There is something special about volcanoes. It’s partly their creative nature. The volcanoes of Hawaii have a solid history of creating big things—Mauna Loa, Mauna Kea, Kilauea, and on Maui the sleeping Haleakala, and an epic hiking trail system, the Sliding Sands Trail. The summit of the trail system, over 10,000 feet above sea level, is astonishing. We walked as much of it as we could under the circumstances.

Volcano trail in the clouds.

The big volcanoes remind us what’s under the surface and how our planet works. When the volcanoes stop, our planet will be as dead as Mars--spent.

Glimpse of the opposite rim.

Farther than it looks, much much farther, on Haleakala.

Ten thousand feet.

The flightless Nene, wondering why everybody feels like they have to mention that.

My son Danny lavishing it up on the sands.

Mysterious island--last shot on the roll.