jumpingfish

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.

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.)