On our way out of Kailua-Kona, we drove back along Queen Ka‘ahumanu Highway past the airport to … Target. Yes, Target. We needed a new suitcase to carry some of our new-found treasures. Sadly Target had none. (How is that possible?)
So our next destination was … CostCo. Yes, CostCo. Certainly they would have a suitcase, and sure enough they did. We wheeled it into the parking lot and threw it into the back of the Jeep, assured that we’d have more space to take stuff home.
And our third stop was Aloha Woods. Yes, Aloha Woods.
On our way to CostCo, at an intersection in the middle of an industrial park, I looked down a side street and saw Aloha Woods in the distance. This was the place that Sam the Ukulele man said would be a good place to stop for Koa wood. “It’s in an industrial park just past the airport,” he said, leading us to write off stopping there, since who drives to an industrial park on their vacation in Hawaii?
Yet here we were, and there it was.
From the outside Aloha Woods resembled a plumbing supply store. Or a paint store. But inside there was furniture of the likes of which we’d never seen before. Gorgeous, hand-crafted furniture made out of local Hawaiian woods. Drool-worthy designs with smooth surfaces and clean lines. Modern, contemporary, one of a kind, and … oh my the cost. Of course, contemporary furniture wasn’t going to fit in our new CostCo suitcase, so the cost was irrelevant.
“Can I help you?” a man asked.
I hummed and hawed a bit. There was no evidence of any scrap lumber in this place.
“Do you have any… I’m looking for Koa scrap. Do you know where I might find some?”
He nodded. “Follow me.”
We went around the counter thru a door into a warehouse in the back.
“Look thru those bins,” he said, pointing to eight large boxes. “The Koa is in the second one on the far side.”
I walked over and started looking thru the boards and scrap.
There it was. I didn’t even have to think twice. Two inches thick. Three feet long. About a foot wide. This was not just a scrap, it was the scrap.
Imagine a sawmill cutting lumber from the twisted, gnarly trunks of Koa trees. And imagine a scrap that falls off the mill at the edges where there’s not enough trunk to make a complete board. That’s what this scrap was. A cross-section of a Koa tree, one edge flat but the other edge tracing the twisted, gnarly edge of the tree.
I held up the scrap and turned it so that the long flat edge was horizontal. And I gasped. Held this way, the twisted, gnarly top edge took the shape of three waves. And the color of the wood at the edge was grey-white rather than rich red-brown, as if the waves were crashing on a beach.
“This is it,” I said.
Back in the front of the store, the man and a woman working behind the counter helped us wrap our treasure in bubble-wrap. They were remarkably patient, helping us wind the bubble wrap around and around the wood, taping it down securely with generous strips of packing tape.
It cost more than I wanted to pay. But to tell you the truth, I wouldn’t have flinched at a piece of art costing twice as much.
We thanked them both as we left the store. We put the wood in the back of the Jeep beside the new suitcase (no way it was going to fit inside). And we got back on the road.