jumpingfish

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.

Highway 11 on the Kona coast is extremely narrow there. The mountain rises up on the one side and drops off steeply on the other side of the two-lane road. Yet just beyond The Coffee Shack there was a narrow pull-off on the narrow shoulder where two cares were parked. Evidently this was the overflow lot.

“Pull over here,” Trudy said, pointing to a space in front of the second car — a narrow triangular space barely long enough and barely wide enough for a car to fit. Perhaps she thought her husband would just whip their rental Jeep over and pull into that tiny spot. Or maybe she thought he’d back into it.

Right.

His first day of driving that Jeep, and he was going to parallel park along the edge of a precipice 1400 feet up the summit of a volcano with a vertical drop awaiting any tire that strays just a bit to far? 

He passed the spot and found a place further down where he could pull off the road on the other side, the mountain side, of the road. And they walked the quarter mile or so back to The Coffee Shack and ate sandwiches and drank Kona coffee as the gazed out the windows down the steep slopes of the mountain out toward the ocean.

And so how does it work with these … verandahs, these big Hawaiian porches, these lanais? These open patios with great flat ceilings to shelter you from the rain or bright sun but otherwise open to the elements. I’m not even sure what you call these places, and I certainly don’t know how they work.

What happens during a storm? Do they take all the furniture away? Do they nail it down? All the tables and chairs and comfortable couches. Do they throw tarps over it to keep it dry?

Or does the rain just mostly fall straight from the sky, leaving everything under these roofs dry? That would explain why the ceilings extend so far out. But seriously, does the wind not blow when the rain falls? And what about the front desks and the paper on the counters and their computers and telephones and things? What happens to them?

It was like this at the airports in Honolulu and Lihue and Kona. It was like this at The Islander in Kapaʻa. And it’s like that here. I just don’t understand it. And it’s so wonderful.

(Part of the ongoing telling of our Spring 2011 trip to Hawaiʻi.)

1.

So with the winter solstice passed, a cold wind has come down from the north. The mid-70s of last week are gone. The faucets are wrapped and the spinach beds covered.

The lizards and beetles and snakes and other creatures of the earth are hidden in their warm places, maybe under the logs in the back or under the brush pile in the corner or maybe under that scrappy pile of logs and brush out front that in the summer is hidden by Salvia and Sage but is about to be revealed up and down the street as the greenery freezes and falls to the ground and the scrap is laid bare for everyone to see.

2.

The cold, grey clouds broke this evening just as the sun went down. And for a moment the chill of the wind around us went away. The sky lit up orange-red in the west, and wisps of cloud overhead burst alive in electric pink against a pastel blue.

“Wow,” I said. “Just look at that.”

Even the woman in the Pearle Vision store walked to the window to admire it.

3.

The sky.

It has been two months now since a single drop of rain fell from the sky. This should be our rainy time. Yet our two brand new 200 gallon cisterns stand empty on the side of the house.

It is cold tonite, and the air is bitter outside. But the real fright is the blistering dry summer that lies before us.

Still, for now … winter.