jumpingfish

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.

The sky was blue. The day was warm. Sunlight glinted off aquamarine water. We sat on the salt-and-pepper beach gazing up the slopes at rain clouds hugging the forest on the mountainside.

It was low tide. The water was far from the sandy shore, and we had to clamber over sharp, black rocks in our flippers to get to the edge.

We swam along the contours. The swells lifted us up until it felt like flying. And they pushed us down to where darting fish and neon anemones hid in crevices and nooks and crannies. After swimming along this way for a while, we would get disoriented and poke our begoggled faces above the water to see where we were.

And as we swam there, a sea turtle passed us by.

Trudy looked back at me, her eyes wide, her finger pointing. I nodded, and we swam a while alongside as the turtle in great sweeps of its fins glided along the counters and rose and fell in the swells on its way to someplace that it seemed to have in mind. We swam alongside, keeping our distance, until the water got shallower and the swells threatened to push us down onto the rocks.

The sea turtle, it kept going.

Ranger Kalehua gave a good talk. He told a good story, and he kept his audience involved in the telling of it. In fact, Kalehua had a knack for spotting people in the audience who might make good targets and pointing to them and saying, “Quick, what’s the name of this place?”

Pu‘uhonua O Honaunau

He picked on the kids, who relished it. He picked on dads standing off to the side. And he picked on…

“Are you going to embarrass me?” Trudy asks.

“No,” I say.

Let’s say that Kalehua had this knack for calling on people whom he must have been certain would tie their tongues in knots trying to speak the name of that place. And well, since I promised not to embarrass the fair and industrious Trudy, let’s just say that she got a fine braided Ti-leaf as a prize.