44 69% 40% 0mph windrose N bar steep rise Ordinary Time Waxing Crescent of the Snow Moon
In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.
– Andre Maurois
Even though the trip is three months away, the travel bug has begun to gnaw at my attention, drawing me toward the Pacific and that peculiar place neither fully Asian nor fully Western nor fully Polynesian, Hawai’i.
When Kate first suggested going to Hawai’i back in 1992, I said no. “There are a lot of places I want to see before beaches and surfboards.”
She persuaded me.
The islands had me at the fragrance of wet soil, evident even when walking on the skyway from the plane to the terminal on Honolulu. It was so pungent, redolent of sailing ships and Buddhas, navigating by the waves and stars. Then, the flowers and the perfume of gardenia and jasmine thick even at highway speeds. Blues, so many blues, from cerulean to sky to turquoise. Greens in even more shades. Greens that climb the mountains, dive into the ocean, and all that wasted green on the golf courses. Most powerful, and I do not sun bathe, the scent of coconut oil and warmed human flesh. Whenever I smell coconut oil, I’m plunged back into the sweetness.
Each time I’ve gone since that first trip I’ve had a theme, something I wanted to pursue in more depth. One trip it was the isolation. Look at the map. Hawai’i is as far away from the continental experience as you can get on terra firma. One evening I sat on the beach on Kauai, listening to the waves crash against the shore. Brilliant pieces of glass sparkled in the black sky. All at once the time between the waves became prominent, a silence, a caesura. The isolation of the islands dwelt in that silence.
Another time I investigated volcanoes. We stayed at Volcano House on the rim of Kilauea. I spent a week hiking Kilauea and Mauna Loa. We managed to be there during a six week cessation in an eruption which has been otherwise consistent since 1983 and which picked up the week after we left. Even so, I hiked out on the lava field from the Puu ‘O ‘O eruptions. Hiking on lava is difficult; it is sharp, jagged and unsmoothed by erosion. When I got out of sight of the visitor area, which took over an hour, it was as if I had landed on an alien world. There were no plants, no buildings, no roads, no signs of life. All I could feel was the occasional heat from lava coursing through lava tubes beneath my feet.
Not sure right now what I want to have for a focus, maybe just r&r. Write, relax, hike, eat fish and papaya. Something will probably come to me.
