It was off to the side of a side road. In a neighborhood. Down the street from a school. In a subdivision with lived-in homes and well-driven cars and trucks parked in the front yards.
At least we thought it was there. The fair and industrious Trudy was doing her best to decipher the directions, but as I drove up and down the street, we found nothing.
“Do you want me to pull off?” I asked. (There are only so many times you can drive up and down a street before someone notices.)
“Yes,” she said as she read and re-read the description.
“We’re looking for an old road,” she said, “and a gate.”
But we had seen nothing except for a fence that ran along a cow pasture.
Wait.
There was a narrow footpath leading into the woods… One of us remembered seeing it, although there was no gate. So we drove slowly up and down the street again. Here is what we found.
Do you see it? The gate. It’s painted yellow.
We pulled off the road as far as we could, locked the car, walked down to the path, squeezed around the gate and walked into another world.
To our left was a field, silent, pastoral, with mist-shrouded mountains in the distance and a cow grazing in the shade just on the other side of the fence.
To our right was forest.
Before us was a flower-strewn path leading down to Kapa‘a Stream.
As we hiked down the path the silence was gradually filled by the sound of rushing water. Trudy was all smiles.
The last few steps were steep and slippery, but after the day before this was a cake walk, almost like descending a staircase … ok, a really muddy staircase.
The stream emerged from the woods to our left and tumbled over some rocks and gurgled left and right and then plunged 10 or 20 feet down a gorge cut in the black rock.
We sat and listened to the rushing water. We snapped pictures of the white and the black and the green.
And we stood aside when another couple emerged from the woods behind us with a tripod for their camera.
“Are you going to the second falls downstream?” the woman asked us.
Well, no we weren’t, we said, looking at each other to make sure. We had a long day ahead of us.
And besides, we had to hike back up the trail we had just come down. Yes, that trail that looked so easy coming down. Did I say something about stairs?
