jumpingfish

I talked to the fourth graders yesterday–something I’ve done from time to time over the years.

“This is Mr. Hasan,” Eric said to his students. “His son was in my class. In fact I am responsible for him breaking his arm when he fell on the soccer field.”

Eric illuminated Ben’s life years ago. He pumped energy and excitement into those kids. And he’s still at it. I saw it twelve years ago. I’ve seen it for the past several years. I saw it again yesterday.

You walk into his class, and it seems, it looks, it sounds like chaos. You can’t hear yourself think. It’s loud. You can’t stand still. It’s hectic. But look carefully and you see kids collaborating on a story and figuring out a puzzle and taking photographs and drawing diagrams and organizing stuff and messing stuff up. There’s excitement everywhere. They’re taking things out. They’re putting things away. They’re milling around with great urgency. Holding pencils and books. Shuffling sheets of paper. Writing things down. Looking things up. Asking questions. Devising explanations.

This is what I walked into just before noon, having come to talk about the Sun, the Earth and the Moon. Except as it turned out, I didn’t get very far.

I never got to origins. I never got to how the moon and sun move in the sky. I never got to proto-planets and proto-suns. There were too many questions. There were too many opinions. Too much excitement. Too much amazement. But we did talk about knowing where the sun is by looking at the crescent on a planet’s moon. We did talk about geosynchronous satellites. We did talk about the North Star. And the Northern Lights. And the aurorae on Neptune. We talked about Andromeda and the Milky way. And the Local Group. And the Virgo Supercluster. And we talked about how it’s all moving and turning and orbiting and transiting and shining. And we talked about how it’s all so very, very cool.

We talked about all that. Not so much Earth/Moon/Sun as it turned out, but I think they liked it. 

There was the boy with black hair in the black shirt who kept raising his hand and looking straight at me but said he was only stretching. There was the girl who kept scooting up behind me in the front of the room so she could be close to the action. There were the boys reclining on the carpet with hands behind their heads asking questions about the photographs. There was the smiling boy who introduced himself during a break, because we have the same name. There were the two kids who high-fived me as they filed off to recess. And there was the girl in pink.

She sat in front with her hand up most of the time. I called on her often. And her questions and comments were sharp. “Good point,” I would say and talk a bit about her observation. “Good question, we don’t know for sure.” Or, “I don’t know, but you could research that.” I couldn’t have planted anyone better. 

“Did you see the girl in the front?” Eric asked.

“The girl in pink?”

“Yes. Did you notice how much she talked, how many questions she asked? She never does that. She’s normally quiet and sits in the back. It’s not like her to speak up.” 

That classroom of his. It’s a veritable bubbling cauldron, and everyone’s in the stew.

There was a sea turtle diving in the deep clear water off the bow of the Fair Wind II when we arrived. Cheryl got us tickets. Years ago in a different life, she worked the boat out of Kona, and this was her anniversary present to us.

They fed us breakfast on the deck as the boat sliced thru the deep blue waters of the ocean. A fair wind filled the sail

although truth be told, we were not really sailing, which was a good thing, because the motor quickly got us to Kealakekua Bay. 

This is where Captain Cook, upon his second landing in the bay, the Makahiki festival of Lono over, met his demise.

On our way to anchor, we passed close to the bejungled shore where a monument stands signifying the spot, the surging surf perhaps remembering.

The water was clear beyond belief. We donned our snorkels and fins and masks and slowly swam in circles above the coral and rocks and fish. It felt more like flying or like that feeling of exhilaration I used to get when as a boy I would swim across the diving well after jumping off the high dive, although of course the deep blue of the ocean and the aquamarine of the water near shore were beyond compare.

 We were dwarfed by the place. By the surging surf pounding on the black lava cliffs as we entered the bay, by the the clear waters that were far deeper than either the fair and industrious Trudy or I dared to dive.

(Look closely for the swimmers in that picture taken from the upper deck of the Fair Wind II. They give a scale of the place.)

As morning drew to a close, they grilled hamburgers on the upper deck. Kids slid off of slides into the crystal green water. Trudy and I, sufficiently snorkeled-out after several long swims, grabbed two hamburgers and snarfed them down and then grabbed two inner tubes and paddled around the inner bay enjoying the sun, enjoying the water, enjoying our tenth anniversary.

Thank you, Cheryl. We had a wonderful time.

Are you kidding me? A one trillion dollar platinum coin? There are pundits seriously talking this thru!?

At least I’m not the only one shaking his head:

The fancy of a $1 trillion platinum coin is so tantalising in part because it puts a monetary option in play. The larger attraction, though, is that it does so in a way that honours democracy by sticking to the letter of democratic legislation, yet also flirts with the heady unilateral decisiveness of fascism. This is, I’m afraid, a combination powerfully intoxicating to the pundit id. We’d be better served, however, if the commentariat would rein in its id, stop its idle chatter about exotic, coin-based, presidential monetary policy, and begin seriously to consider the more probable but less glittering eventuality of a Greek-style default. [emph. added]

—The Economist/Democracy In America blog/The Platinum Distraction.

At the end of the day, after our walk in the woods among the frogs of Manuka State Wayside, we headed back to Kona on the western flanks of Mona Loa along Highway 11. We passed back thru the desolate Kipahoehoe Natural Area and took the turn-off back to Honaunau.

You see, the fair and industrious Trudy had spotted another place to go: Captain Cook, an enclave on Kealakekua Bay, where Captain Cook landed in the 1700s. From Pu‘u Honua o Honaunau, City of Refuge Road (State Highway 160) ran straight north our destination.

“Go this way,” said Trudy who was studying her maps intently and pointing up the road.

The road quickly became a single lane blacktop stretching across another desolation. There was no shoulder, and the road fell off 10 feet on either side. Beside the road flakes and slabs of cracking pavement were difficult to distinguish from the black lava of the landscape. After driving a while with no place to turn around and no indication that we were getting anywhere near the bay, we … well, we just had to keep going and hope that we didn’t run into a vehicle going the other direction.

Happily, there was no traffic. But there was a thick cable running beside the road, a sign perhaps of civilization ahead. And now and then the bleakness of the land was broken by a rock wall that ran up to the road’s edge after crossing that no-man’s land. (And just who built those walls, why and when?)

With no sign of anything ahead, I kept wondering aloud if this was really where we meant to be. And Trudy, studying her maps closely was certain that we were heading in the right direction. There were, the map assured her, no other roads thru this ancient lava flow, and the map said this road ran straight north into Captain Cook. And sure enough we came to an intersection and were back in civilization.

Now there were trees and flowers and homes and cottages and yards and gardens beside a narrow, winding road.

“Turn here,” Trudy said. Then, “Turn here.” And now we were driving along the bay.

“There should be a place to stop.”

The sun was getting low over the western ocean, and we were really hoping to catch sunset over the bay. Yet we drove past nothing but homes and cottages with no obvious place to look out.

And suddenly, there it was: a small parking lot with a park at the water’s edge—the perfect place, the place Trudy was taking us to all along. A breeze blew out of the west off the water. The the air was fresh. There were some other people standing on the beach taking pictures of the sunset.

We stood there for a few moments looking out on the bay, on the darkening sky, on the water washing up on the shore, on the jagged rocks breaking the surf. And we watched the sun descend into clouds on the horizon.

It had been a good day.

1. Going to Green Sands

We had this idea. Why not drive to Green Sand beach?

Green Sand or Mahana or Papkolea beach near South Point in Ka‘u is actually the remains of a cinder cone that erupted 50,000 years ago. The ocean has worn it away, and green olivine sand covers the shore. And from that description, you should realize that we didn’t have this idea at all. It was the fair and industrious geologist beside me who reasoned that since you need a 4×4 to drive the road to South Point, and since we had a rental 4×4 Jeep at our disposal, and since it is one of two olivine beaches in the world… well why on earth not!? 

It got cooler as we climbed the side of the island on the increasingly narrow Highway 11. As the road twisted and turned, it started to rain. And as the rain began to come down in earnest, the sides of the road got surprisingly steep. And then, in the rain on the edge of a precipice, Trudy discovered what the rental guy at the airport had actually told us two days before: you can go almost anywhere on the island with their Jeeps, but you aren’t allowed to drive to Green Sands beach.

There was nowhere to turn around.

2. What We Did Instead

The landscape there is bleak. The island loses the jungle feel of Kona and has more of a slag-heap look, as if a crack in the earth had opened and belched flame and flowing rock.

… Oh wait. That’s what Hawaii is.

Still, I tell you in places this was utterly forsaken land. I kept driving as Trudy studied her maps and guidebooks for an alternative plan. And of course, she found something.

There on one of the maps, although entirely unmentioned in any of the guidebooks, is Manuka State Park. We keep a lookout as we drive along. The rain has stopped, and we hope perhaps for a hike.

A mile or two after Kipahoehoe State Natural Area, where not so long ago the earth did open up and black pahoehoe did flow across the land, I went roaring past the entrance to the park. But the road was wider now, so I turned around and drove into the park and stopped beside some picnic tables.

No one else was there, except a guy in his pickup truck who looked as if he might just live there in his truck most of the time. And except there was this other guy who came walking briskly down the trail out of the forest taking great strides and making for I don’t know what because frankly I don’t remember a car in the parking lot that would have been his.

This was it. This was our substitute for Green Sand beach.